@fiery_furnaces at
@lowerthirdsoho
Dream come true; my absolute favourite band ever. Just Eleanor and Matthew, vocals and piano, in a tiny room with less than 150 people. If you’re not familiar with the Fiery Furnaces, they’re a brother-sister duo from Chicago who spin wild, dense, hauntological tales, comic and heartbreaking, over music pitched somewhere in the universe of garage rock, indie pop, electronic prog freak out and old timey radio play. Live, they subject their catalog of songs to an absolute blender of mutation and distillation. Nothing stays in place for long. The effect is something like that idea that your life flashes before your eyes before you die; a dizzying indexical recovery, a scramble of fragments and incomplete remembrances. I don’t think they played a single song through front to back (maybe just “Evergreen”, before the encore), which could sound frustrating, if it weren’t for the thrilling reward of constant surprise and reorientation. Matthew is a gifted piano player with such an idiosyncratic ear for melody, truly out of time. Eleanor sings with a muscularity and tongue-twister-athleticism, in tones at once strict, commanding and delicately sorrowful. I laughed and gasped and tried to sing along to every word (a challenge for sure). They played something from every record, including my favourite, Rehearsing My Choir, which they recorded with their grandmother and which no critic I’ve read appreciated or understood. “Slavin’ Away”, one of my all-time favourite songs, demolished me, and the call and response singalong of “Tropical Iceland” at the end put me back together. What imprinted on me most from this performance, with the incredible scrambling of material, that I’ve never seen another artist convey so beautifully, is that nothing is precious, aside from your memory and the given moment. I hope I get to catch them again someday but if not I’ll remember this one.
