There's nothing wrong with manipulating a live performance before you cut it to record-- it all depends on what you do with it. The Fiery Furnaces have waited this long to release an official live album, and it's no surprise that they would try to surprise us. The Furnaces' live show is infamous: Instead of just staging the songs, the band rearranges them, reshuffles the parts, and strings them together into lengthy medleys that can run the length of a whole set. And the next time they hit town, they've usually shuffled the deck again, with a new setlist and sometimes even a new band behind the Friedberger siblings, who are the only constant.
On top of all that, the ever-wacky Matt Friedberger and bassist and mixer Jason Loewenstein have added another layer of reinvention: They've taken several gigs and spliced those together into seamless medleys, one per CD, that span all the band's studio albums in two hour-plus marathons. For an added gag, the longer tracks splice tapes of completely different shows into a single performance, so the line-up keeps changing and the sound quality jumps from soundboard to bootleg and back again. It's original, and it's ear-achingly annoying, and for that matter, so is the rest of the album.
Remember's core flaw is its pacing. Disc One in particular is a marathon that's run like a sprint. Those frantic medleys are never as relentless in person as the digital fiction constructed on this record; this is anxious music that's been honed to its most keyed-up sections with no release, endlessly dry-humping your ear. A rare half-minute of downtime during "Don't Dance Her Down" is stomped by a synth blitzkrieg while Eleanor's vocals-- whose scraps of lyrics have become arbitrary and meaningless-- sound ever-more hectoring. And then comes "Single Again", again.
The disc fares better in small chunks. The Blueberry Boat tracks include ferocious bootlegs and classic rock guitarwork, yet the album's long epics fall victim to the most aggressive editing: "Chief Inspector Blancheflower" roars up to what could've been the album's best moment before it cuts abruptly to a deathly quiet recording of the Friedbergers having a sibling moment. "Chris Michaels", opening Disc Two, is the only track to get through unscathed. The Bitter Tea section with added percussionist Michael Goodman comes across with the best flow and the fewest distractions, and the brisker, grandmother-free Rehearsing My Choir material stays just on the right side of manic. But by the end, Widow City is cut to a taster that whizzes by in the last few minutes-- which is ironic, since the that tour has featured straightforward, song-by-song setlists.
Remember disappoints because it cheats us out of the chance to hear a near-miracle. The Friedbergers always go into the studio with erratic ideas and indulgent conceits-- Inuit lyrics, quirk-prog fables, tongue-in-cheek chance compositions, and of course, the underappreciated tale of Olga Sarantos. Yet they always take these disparate ideas and pull them together with a solid conceit, consistent themes, and deliberately naïve bravado. It's something else to see them pull off the same trick on tour, where the stakes are so much higher. The joy of watching them not fly off the rails made even the weaker shows worth hearing. But in turning that experience into a scrapbook, Remember kills the magic.
Put simply, it's strange for such a great album band to make a live record that fails as an album. But give it credit for one thing: It captures the live experience, warts and all. Why else would they include Eleanor flubbing a line right on track two, after they went to such pains making all the other edits? Feel free to invent your own meta-message about the unpredictability of touring, the chaos of tackling ever-trickier setlists for stubborn hipster crowds, and the spirit of taking risks in the moment that could haunt you to the rest of your days. Take it with a sense of humor. Or just trust the sleevenotes, which warn, "Please do not attempt to listen to all at once."
