Fiery Furnaces
Rehearsing My Choir
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Call it attention-benefit disorder on the geriatric tip: Delightfully daft bro-and-sis act Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger bring their Greek grandmother Olga Sarantos aboard to sing an hour's worth of interwoven narratives about priests who can't stay in tune and a pastry shop with "chocolate so bitter it could cure typhus." As ever, the Fiery Furnaces' music happily thumbs its nose at genre boundaries and traditional song structure. Matthew's manic lyrics -- which evoke a cage match between Ian Whitcomb and Nelson Algren -- combine with techno pulses and squirrelly spinet lines on "The Wayward Granddaughter," a love story involving two Kevins who attend a Chicago basketball camp for "underprivileged
Read More kids and overstimulated brats." It doesn't always sound nice when Eleanor and Olga trade vocals, but there's an odd family magic that comes to the fore. Yes, these prose-stuffed metasongs require concentrated listening. But the rewards are rich, the experience unique.
The fourth operatic epic from siblings Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger revolves around their grandmother Olga Sarantos. Done in an experimental modern prog style, the oral history includes plenty of Moog keyboards, spoken word passages and skewed humor, and moves at a fragmented yet rollicking pace.
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