So remember three, four months ago? The heady days of mid-/late-summer, sticky sweat, bike riding, twilight concerts? Here in D.C. the much anticipated heat and Code Red days (referring not to terrorist threat but air quality) never really arrived. And somehow, most of the folks I know missed the Blueberry Boat, as it gathered up all the critics and hurried them off to foreign ports.
Really, remember the unbelievable amount of critical praise this album got? Once Slate devotes an entire article to an album on Rough Trade, there's definitely some sort of major buzz about it. (The next step is probably a Sasha-Frere Jones article in the New Yorker, but those articles are usually about crunk, focus-group R&B, and the hot new shit from London, so the kids from Oak Park will probably miss out.)
Still, I never heard people talk about it, never really heard anyone playing the Fiery Furnaces at parties. I chalked it up to the length of the songs, since it seemed from reading about it that every one was a 7+ minute pastiche of styles and ideas, needing annotations, an atlas, and a seaman's manual to fully comprehend. I suppose that the folks at Pitchfork led the charge, giving the album a 9.6 rating, fawning over the "encyclopedic references" and the album's "perfect flow." Only the energetic but kind of mediocre Arcade Fire album has gotten a higher rating this year on that site. If you're a person who thinks they like really high ideas in their rock music, it sounds like it's worth listening to, getting into, putting on mix CDs to suprise friends. It sounded like that kind of music you crushed on, had a fling with, then visited occasionally for years and years.
But when I went into Newbury Comics in Cambridge two weeks ago, there were 2 copies of Blueberry Boat sitting in the used bin. I thought both "what luck!" (especially because they were having a used CD sale) since it was a price that made me feel like taking a chance on it, and "that doesn't bode well" because, let's face it, that means that 4 months after the utter freak out, there's two used copies for sale in a very active music store. Was it above people's heads?
Maybe, but it doesn't matter. There are a couple of huge problems with this album, and no one I read is saying them. Complex, referential lyrics may be great to think about, but they need melody and a voice to carry them. And the music on Blueberry Boat is just not good enough to listen to for 7, 9, 10 minutes at a pop. I'll try to stay away from somewhat unsubstantial sticking points (like the fake British accent, "cuhrse" instead of "curse," which is COMPLETELY FUCKING IRRITATING) but since I'm hating, it's not going to look good no matter what.
So-- let's talk about those melodies. Sister Eleanor's voice stays in key, but that's about the most I can say about it. Her range, both in notes and emotions, is ridiculously limited. And because there's little brevity on this album, she moves quickly from seeming mediocre to seeming kind of terrible. Maybe because of this, the Furnaces traffic mostly in 3 or 4 note melodies. In the first three songs, which seem to have the most ideas packed into them, also often double these incredibly boring melodies. Even though this is done with those retro organs and guitars mentioned in all the fawnings, it just drills these melodies into your head, tiring them out even quicker than they would have on their own.
Also, the phrasing never moves beyond a 4-bar arc. Almost every time a song change occurs (and they can be especially jerky, especially when the rhythm changes along with the evaporation of any audible beat), the lines are sung over these A-B, A-B, A-B phrases, 2 bars per letter. Adding to this, there's a constant rhythmic stress on the top of each letter, regardless if you can hear a drumbeat or not. You can almost see a high-school band (not a rock band, the ones that school's sanction) playing these parts with exaggerated head-nods: "One... Two... One... Two..." Over and over and over again. Again it's the first 3 songs that are the primary culprits, being both the thematic basis for the whole album, and taking a combined 27 motherfucking minutes.
The phrasing in the lyrics doesn't help much. Brother Matthew is the one responsible for this, and while he should be commended for playing up really big ideas and having a lot of books, he really should figure another way to finesse his ideas and big words rather than jamming them into single lines. I guess this was to keep up the rhyming scheme, but this add to the dull inevitability of the two-chord see-saw. No matter how many words are shoe-horned into a single line, you know it will form a rhyming couplet. Everytime the music whiplashes into a new section, there's a first line--i.e. "Down in Columbo girl whatever you want"--and you could make up the next line, because there is no doubt that it'll rhyme. (You can play this game with Dylan songs--get four people in the car and play "Everybody Must Get Stoned" but make up your own words for every other line, good times.) Would it substantially change the meaning?This might seem like a small point, but can I stress again that it's a 76-minute-long concept album? The ideas are all there, but the variation and flow is totally absent. The flow is so bad and so similar in every song, it seems like Matt wrote them all out at once. And, well, try singing lines from "Quay Cur," "Blueberry Boat," and "Chris Michaels" with the (2-fucking-note) melody from "My Dog Was Lost..." As they say in Southeast Asia, same-same.
There are some nice moments on the album. The travelling album and changing music works well with some reverb and quiet moments (and melodic variation), like in the middle and end of "Mason City." But this stresses another enormous problem with this album, it's mixed fucked up. Eleanor's voice is totally missing sometimes when all the instruments come in (like towards the beginnig of "Chris Michaels" or on "Chief Inspector Blancheflower" which has a lot of utter randomness, but has that melodic variation I was missing, so I shouldn't bitch). Either the mix was bad or they should have had her sing notes outside the ones the organs and guitars are playing in those moments. The volume level throughout most of the album is basically the same.
The surprise is all in the ideas. Once you read about those ideas, where is this music going? There might be enormous complexity on the lyrics sheet, but if you don't really feel like listening to the end of the song, why bother caring what they are singing? Why bother owning the fucking album, even though you bought it?
There were some warnings that this might happen. Eric Weisbard, writing in Slate, says that this album is a bona-fide critics' darling regardless of how much they hear it. In the process, he basically admits what critic-haters have suspected all along, that preconceptions overwhelm a writer's reactions to those first listenings. Choice quote: "And this is the only album I've heard this year that can out-rock-critic anybody." Problem is, this critic freak out shows that most music critics got English BAs. The music is fucking boring. Did we really buy a CD solely for the lyrics in the liner notes?
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