Just a few years into their career, and the Fiery Furnaces are already one of rock's most restless, unpredictable bands. The sibling duo launched in 2003 with an addictively quirky debut (Gallowsbird's Bark), promptly rolled out an elaborate follow-up (2004's epic Blueberry Boat), released a collection of UK singles and B-sides (the full-length EP), and are now about to dump their grandest opus to date on poised-and-perplexed ears: Rehearsing My Choir is a sprawling piano opera starring Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger's grandmother, Olga Sarantos, and it's every bit as terrible and fantastic as it sounds.
If you can swallow Rehearsing My Choir as oral history, in the vein of NPR's National Story Project or Tom Russell's Kerouac-slurping poetry, the album offers an extraordinarily detailed portrait of mid-century Chicago, all rickety old Fords, crinkling photographs of Robert Mitchum, excessive drinking, gabbing about the war, working on the railroad. The sequencing isn't chronological-- if you trace the map Matthew includes in the record's press kit, the album moves from the present to the 40s, 20s, 30s, 50s, back to the 40s, into the 60s, and then the 90s-- though it doesn't much matter, as the narrative instead follows the kind of internal timeline that makes sense only to its tellers. Ultimately, it's the story of Sarantos' love of her late husband, the heft of her grief, and all the stuff that happened between first kiss and funeral march-- from the condolence cards of opener "The Garfield El" to the graveyard of closer "Does It Remind You of When?", Rehearsing My Choir is a weird testament to the inevitable passage of time, and the casualties of inertia.
As a think piece, Rehearsing My Choir is enormously engaging, but as a pop record, it's exhausting and fruitless. Narrative supersedes melody time after time; there are no real songs, just cacophonous noodling and stacks and stacks of polysyllabic words. The majority of the record plays like amateur musical theater, steeped in prog-rock dementia and in love with the sound of its own voice. Unsurprisingly, the chief exception is the predominantly grandma-free (and essentially irrelevant, at least story-wise) "The Wayward Granddaughter": The song features drum machine boinks and zip-zapping synths and Matthew's disco whirls bouncing off Eleanor's (comparatively) silky pipes, as she embodies "Connie," a popular, Greek-American teenager who bites it (metaphorically, and possibly literally) at the hands of one of two boyfriends named Kevin. When Sarantos eventually does appear, it's as Connie's grandmother-- and delivers some of the record's most telling couplets, lamenting the capriciousness of age ("Her gorgeous red-brown hair black/ When she turned 15 behind my back") and, to an extent, explaining the impetus behind the entire enterprise ("Well, we could talk about it, Connie/ But often, memories are better off sung/ Remember when I was young?").
Sarantos' voice is weird and spectacular, dripping with dramatic flair, richer than Eleanor's determinably flat intones, and more obviously enthralled with the material. Deep and vaguely creaky, with just enough quake to emphasize the gravity of her story, Sarantos' pipes are thick and androgynous, heavy with the weight of hindsight-- appropriately, they age as the record plods onward, and by the closing track, Sarantos sounds exhausted and beaten. Eleanor's role, vocally, is less clear: For the most part, she embodies her grandmother's younger self-- the self-ascribed voice-of-the-moment-- but she does so without immediacy or aplomb, leaving the two vocal lines too distinct to convincingly articulate the same story.
Meanwhile, the band does its best to incorporate Matthew's instrumental diddles, with varying success. "We Wrote Letters Everyday" uses upright piano to recreate long-lost love letters; it's a coy, earnest device, protecting the sanctity of the form. "Who knows what we wrote/ And what they said/ But this is probably how they read," Sarantos muses, followed by alternating bits of dark, longing piano and sprightly keyboards. Later, breaking down the voices of the priests at her wedding ("They all had fine voices/ But, and I mean this respectfully, they didn't match pitch," Eleanor clucks), Sarantos commands, "Listen!"-- and we're rewarded with an off-key, disharmonious keyboard mess that's perfectly logical in the context of the story, but, taken independently, makes for supremely crappy listening. So goes the whole of the record-- the music is sharp and grating, too reliant on narrative nuance, and unsure of its own role.
Thus, the central problem of Rehearsing My Choir: It's a spectacular experiment, groundbreaking and perverse, bloated with possibilities and prime for parsing. But its practical function is unclear. No matter how open your mind, how welcome to art-without-directions you may be, it's difficult to consume Rehearsing My Choir without taking some kind of quasi-academic, cultural studies stance, reachable only after hours of careful, dedicated, uninterrupted listening: The emotional components are in place, but willfully (and successfully) obscured behind obtuse instrumentation and overdone wordplay. You can pick it apart, but can you dance to it, roll around on the floor with it, weep to it under your favorite blanket? This is not to say that art should be easy or instant or utilitarian-- but it should be penetrable, purposeful. And somewhere along the way, the Friedbergers got all chewed up and swallowed by their own experiment.
