The Fiery Furnaces Remember by: Thomas Mendelovits Tue:21-Oct-08 Label: Thrill Jockey Year: 2008 WB rating 64 out of 100

If the purpose of a live album is to remember, then the Fiery Furnaces have nothing to fear with this release. The odds of forgetting them after even one full listen through this two-disc compilation spanning two years of touring is so slight as to almost guarantee a permanent burn on one’s consciousness. Whether or not that is your idea of a good listen, mind-fucking is what the Fiery Furnaces do best. As on their six studio albums (all represented here, mostly in chronological order), the sibling duo of songwriter/keyboardist/guitarist/producer Matthew and lyricist/singer Eleanor Friedberger are out to prove on Remember that there is no one way with a song. In an interview on InTheRawTv before a 2006 show at Sydney’s Gaelic Club, Matthew summed up their guiding principle when he asked: “what’s your excuse to make yet another rock record? You’ve got to exaggerate it one way or the other for it to be legitimate… and the way you do that won’t be liked by a lot of people”. At 51 tracks and around 90 minutes, to describe Remember as an exaggeration is really pretty apt. Like the endless critiques of Bob Dylan’s predilection for changing things up live, Remember is sure to bring the same “is the musician as artist important or is the listener as fan important?” questions to the fore.

From the eight minutes opus of ‘Blueberry Boat’ that begins the record, it’s obvious that we’re in for a bit of an intellectual treat in trying to untangle just what is going on here. Two minutes and five seconds in, the acoustics change and you realise they’ve mixed together various live recordings. Despite this arguably killing the whole ‘I’m experiencing a gig in my living room’ idea of the live recording (a paradigm the Friedbergers would probably be all too happy to dismantle anyway), these venue chops and changes are mixed quite seamlessly and you soon forget they even occur. When they do occur, however, the point the Fiery Furnaces are making is all too clear, being…. cue drum roll and extended synth breakdown/organ crescendo/guitar solo jam… virtuosity.

The salsa drums and horror organ of ‘Vietnamese Telephone Ministry’ is pretty phenomenal stuff, but funnily enough, for every extended ‘Blueberry Boat’, medley, and reprise, often the versions represented here are much abridged cuts of the studio recordings. The climax of ‘Vietnamese Telephone Ministry’ stays as totally bizarre as the Bitter Tea version (where Eleanor sings: “and then finally I called up the Vietnamese Telephone Ministry”), but it leaves out the best part, where she freaks out listing its number over and over: “323-221-7625”. This highlights a main problem of Remember. While the shorter, more direct versions of the album songs may work better live; the listener at home cannot sense this. There are so many songs, so many changes and so many theatrics that, soon enough, it all becomes a blur.  

The undeniable genius of the Fiery Furnaces is to make music as dizzyingly reflective of globalisation/post-modernity/whatever as it can be to the people who live in its clutches/reveries/whatever. To experience a line like “so I flew to Sydney and then to Bali and then to Jakarta/and called on my step-father's ex-business partner Major Timmy Sastrosatomo/and he set me up as a silver smith/batik dabber” in a song (‘Borneo’), imagining a transnational jetset lifestyle most only dream of in a live setting, is something so far removed from the typical live music experience that in this regard alone the Fiery Furnaces are commendable. But compared with the epic journeys through various instrumentations, tones and tempos that songs such as ‘Borneo’ were on their studio albums, the Remember versions are necessarily pared back for performance by however many players they could afford to take on tour. There are moments where the prog-rock formula hits home – as on the excessive guitar rock of ‘Two Fat Feet’, ‘Chris Michaels’ and ‘Asthma Attack’ – but mostly the combination of Matthew’s myriad keyboards and Eleanor’s lyrics find themselves strangely homeless. The songs are bound in exotica, but the demands of the tour allow only for minimal, if exceptionally musical, noodling.  

Overall, as a showcase of the Fiery Furnaces occasionally mind-blowing combination of musical nous and wacky genre-bending and convention-overhauling song ‘types’, Remember sets a pretty high bar for progressive indie music. A Greatest Hits type package would be insulting to this band, so for an overview of what the Fiery Furnaces are all about, Remember may have to do. However, for someone who has never seen them in person, I found myself eagerly checking YouTube for live clips of the Remember songs. Indeed, Remember is not recorded so well that it offers anything far beyond the average Internet video. One thing noticeable from the live clips is that they sound far more like a mighty fine band than is suggested by the mixes on Remember, which often sound like Eleanor singing along to her brother’s keyboards. While the Friedberger siblings may be the heart of the band, that doesn’t mean they are the basis of the live experience of the Fiery Furnaces. As such, an included DVD would be a much better handle on the band’s powers as a whole.