The Fiery Furnaces' debut, Gallowsbird’s Bark, pegged them as a whimsical but rootsy New York band, one compared numbingly often to The White Stripes. Most of the clean garage revival was as predictable as a Guy Lombardo tribute, but the Furnaces stood apart, both for their The Band-meets-Syd Barrett nuggets and their lyrics, which read like a ransom note made from ripped-up atlases. Frontwoman Eleanor Friedberger sang "I went to" as often as James Brown goes "unh," and her brother Matt coupled raucous guitar leads with a piano that rollicked like a fall down the stairs.
Yet nothing on Gallowsbird's Bark hints at the ambition of The Fiery Furnaces' second album, the 76-minute Blueberry Boat. The 10-minute opener, "Quay Cur", sets the stage: After a two-minute overture with loud, blatting organs that pump like they're driven by bellows, Eleanor is introduced in the character of a child who lost her protective locket, "and now I'll never never, never feel like I'm safe again," she says. The adventure starts: They cut to the next section, where the guitars come in on a deluge of nautical imagery-- and then the frenzy gives way to an acoustic interlude that finds Eleanor singing gently in... Inuit?
The Furnaces pull off other mini-operas on "Blueberry Boat"-- on which Eleanor faces off against a gang of pirates-- and "Chris Michaels", whose different parts run together so quickly that its story is almost mashed to gibberish. Matt Friedberger, who-- unlike on the band's first album-- wrote all of the material, emerges as a pop auteur. Matt has acknowledged the influence of The Who's rock suites, "A Quick One, While He's Away" and "Rael", but instead of taking a single theme and expanding it into one lengthy song, Matt is more likely to concatenate half-dozen seemingly separate ideas in a way that makes every piece-- even a straightforward track such as "Straight Street"-- feel epic.
So much stuff is jammed into Blueberry Boat that you'd think Freidberger put some of it in for kicks. The Noah's Ark of retro guitars and garish prog keyboards initially seems random, and on the evidence of the Furnaces' live shows, these versions aren't even definitive: Their sets rework, split and remake their repertoire into one breathless block of music, one on which a song might show up for only one verse or come back three or four times. But this isn't arbitrary: Matt and Eleanor are just reworking and sequencing the songs for different contexts. The process resembles the way a DJ sets up a mix, and-- like in a club setting-- the final product should be judged not simply on which pieces they use, but on how well those segments work as a whole and how the band controls the energy in the room.
Blueberry Boat's 13 tracks form a perfect flow, sticking short tunes between the mini-operas, building up through "Chris Michaels" to the brief respite of the "Paw Paw Tree" before exploding into "I Lost My Dog", the album's dizziest travelogue. As scrambled as Matt's palette may sound, a close listen reveals how perfectly he evokes each song's content: The sighing tones near the start of "Blueberry Boat" sound like waves lapping the bow of their vessel, "Mason City"'s beat chugs softly, like a train gliding into a station, and on "I Lost My Dog" Matt captures the frenzy of running all over town by switching instrumentation with every verse.
The lyrics keep pace, repeating the encyclopedic references and buckshot wordplay of the last album, but extending the narratives. Matt pulls us in and out of the fantasy-- as on "Spaniolated", where Eleanor starts as a grown-up slacker, only to find herself abducted before regressing back into childhood and given pills "to keep from growing taller." Gallowsbird's Bark told similarly meticulous stories about Eleanor's real-life wanderings through London or New Jersey, but this time the songs grow into elaborate fictions, and the stakes are higher, with battles and abductions belying the cheerful arrangements.
The Furnaces sound tighter here than on their debut, but they still retain a sense of carelessness and spontaneity-- listen to the rambunctious piano interlude on "Blueberry Boat" or the distracted spit off his guitar solos. Matt sings more on this record, with a delivery similar to Peter Gabriel in his Genesis days, and Eleanor's melodic, speak-singy vocals show a wider range and more force. Eleanor pushes her crystal-clear enunciation with a more aggressive delivery, especially when she slips into character, such as when she stands up to a mob of pirates and swears, "You ain't never getting the cargo of my blueberry boat."
John Darnielle's Last Plane to Jakarta devastatingly parodied The Strokes approach to their second album, joking that they would use their money and clout to make a two-album monster with eight-minute jams, tuba solos and a Gregg Allman guest spot. Whether that sounds like a dream or a nightmare, the joke was on us: The Strokes' second album sounded mostly like their first. But The Fiery Furnaces have made the kind of rock behemoth Darnielle described, a record for the overgrown part of our brain that craves engrossing complexity. The exuberant overload of Blueberry Boat will thrill and transport you with the ineluctable force of a great children's story, one whose execution matches its imagination. And like all the best children's stories, it takes off once the kids break the rules-- when they're dragged away from safety but have enough curiosity and faith in themselves to enjoy the adventure. We're just lucky to trail behind and pick up their breadcrumbs.
