care not for whom they play The Turk

Fiery Furnaces: Blueberry Boat

When Gallowsbird’s Bark came out, its humid old South eccentricities overtook me like a summer fever and it simmered in me for months. I championed it to everyone and was eager to hear their next deranged shot in the dark. My first impression upon listening to Blueberry Boat was ‘Christ, you need an annotated bibliography to get through this thing, I think I’m in love.’ Gone were the junked pianos, the boneyard guitars, the tenement percussion. Wheeled in was a great pile of rickety salt-in-the-joints electronic equipment and everything was just so much more frantic.

The album begins, appropriately, by heading down to the docks and leaving port. Packed to the gills with archaic language, it’s the story of a rotting boat blown out to sea, rat-eaten sails and anchor chain rusted through, our narrator protected by silver charms, laid low with the croup, and pressganged into service. Not that there is any universality of time in this, we skate from era to era with reckless abandon, from computer cafes in Damascus to 18th century chess automatons, wandering airport and train terminals, making bird noises, talking in ethnic slang of various periods and places, selling insurance door-to-door, dreaming of mending typewriters. An absolute frenzy of ideas. You know immediately that this is a total departure, from the heavy electronic beat that announces “Quay Cur” overlaid with glitched-up piano samples. As Eleanor sings, ‘I will never never never feel that I am safe again,’ and with good reason, because it is an album that is never content to sit still within a song. Five minutes in, “Quay Cur” is a raggedy blues/folk duet right out of Gallowsbird’s Bark, and then a slow, atmospheric number, then some piano and synthesizer interplay brings it right back to the start.

However, it’s the second song where the album really takes flight. “Straight Street” piles on keening sirens of guitars over galloping piano, hand percussion, noise, loose strings, anything they can get their hands on while Eleanor really lets loose with an imperative traveling paranoid monologue, working its way into an epic organ and strings piece. All bets officially off, the title track comes along full of peculiar carnival noise and tales of defying the wills of pirate captors, abruptly going gloriously insane at the five and a half minute point. “Chris Michaels” is that blissful moment where it all miraculously comes together for eight wild minutes of peeping and low gossip, snaky jazz bass and big, punchy rock guitar. It’s so good it should be wrong.

Oh, what joyous lunacy. It’s the sort of album that’s so undefeatably cheerful in its ludicrousness that you can forgive and even celebrate songs like “My Dog Was Lost But Now He’s Found” which is really quite a long way to go for a religion joke that was old when my great grandparents were still eating mud in the Ukraine. That Eleanor copping the ‘rain in spain’ line from Pygmalion and changing it to pain is perfectly square. Their fakebook is so far-reaching you can’t begrudge them any haphazard inclusions. ‘Pick up your trumpet, pick up your plastic, pretend trumpet, blow me your horn today!’ How could you resist?

****1/2

~ by jshopa on January 3, 2009.