The Fiery Furnaces/Man Man - Theater of Living Arts, June 27, 2006

If you've ever heard a Fiery Furnaces album, you know how tough it would be to pull that stuff off live. To recreate something that even remotely resembled the albums, you'd need about five guitarists, two drummers, and maybe eight keyboard players. And I knew that the Furnaces only toured with a four-man band, and that their live performances didn't much resemble the albums, but I still didn't really know what to expect. So it was with a high degree of anticipation that I went to see them.

The other reason I was really looking forward to it is because I love the Fiery Furnaces. Every single album they've done is great, and they're one of the most inventive and unique bands in the world. They're one of the few bands who could pick pretty much any song from their entire catalog and make me happy. I love them enough to have written about them one, two, three, and four times at this very site.

But first (actually second, but I didn't get there in time to see the first band), I had to see Man Man. I knew nothing about Man Man going into the show other than that they're from Philadelphia (bonus points!) and that they have a stupid band name (points off!). They started playing, and I hated them almost immediately. It sounded like the Mahavishnu Orchestra trying to be the Mars Volta. It was repellent. Then they calmed down a bit and got into some actual songs, and what do you know! They're actually really good! It's easy to see why the Fiery Furnaces have them on tour with them, because they're just as batshit crazy as the Furnaces are. The phrase that kept coming to mind is "precision train wreck." They walk a perfect balance between structure and absolute chaos, and by the time four of the five members were blowing simultaneously through party favor horns (the fifth member was playing a melodica, of all things), I was smiling with glee. I'll have to check out their albums and see if they bring half the ruckus of their live show.

So then the Fiery Furnaces went on. As I'd mentioned before, I expected something different, but I wasn't prepared for how different it would be. Faced with the unenviable and more or less impossible task of recreating their own music, they did the only thing they could do: they didn't even try. Every song was restructured, often with only the melody left intact, and sometimes not even that. Maybe all those comparisons they got to the Who awhile back were actually referring to their live show, because that was really the closest reference point. If the Fiery Furnaces on record are an unpredictable mash up of every possible instrument, mood, and genre, the Fiery Furnaces live are a driving, power rock outfit with prog-rock chops.

The result was almost like watching a cover band, except no cover band on this planet would touch a song like "The Garfield El" with a 20-foot pole. I was wondering if they'd play anything from Rehearsing My Choir, and they did a three song medley from it, with Matt and Eleanor splitting the vocal duties of their octogenarian grandmother (what? she wouldn't come on tour with them?). If the songs from that album confused people in their recorded versions, I can't even imagine what they would feel like watching them performed live. Hell, even I had trouble following them, and I've heard them a hundred times.

Of course, that's true for about the entire set. The Furnaces' songs tend to take tons of undpredictable hairpin turns as it is, and live they're usually played at double time or more, with completely different arrangements. "Quay Cur" was virtually unrecognizable, as was "My Little Thatched Hut." Even songs that they could have given a fairly straight reading ("My Dog Was Lost but Now He's Found," "Tropical Iceland") were completely different (although "Crystal Clear" and "Chris Michaels" somehow came through relatively unscathed). And I was so busy wondering what they were going to do with the myriad synth parts that I didn't even think about how they were going to replicate all the backwards lyrics and stuff until they started playing "Black Hearted Boy." But ultimately, to wonder about that is to miss the point. This wasn't about replication. It was about reinvention. I should expect nothing less from the Fiery Furnaces.

Overall, I think I'll take the studio versions of their songs over the live ones, and they lack a real forceful and charismatic lead singer (although Eleanor was clearly more comfortable than Matt), but it was hard not to be impressed by the skill necessary to pull off what they did. I'd like to hear a live album from them sometime.

p.s. At the top of the post is a picture I took. I hope it works ok. I'm new at posting photos to this thing.

Thom Yorke - The Eraser

First of all, let's clarify something - Thom Yorke's The Eraser is a solo album. Yorke himself would like you to think otherwise: "I don't wanna hear that word solo. Doesn't sound right." But it's a record made by one guy who usually makes records with a larger group. It's a solo record.

Ok, nitpicking over. On to the music.

The Eraser is either a) a documentation of Thom Yorke in a bit of a slump or b) proof that Radiohead's brilliance is much bigger than Thom Yorke alone. I'm inclined to take b), since Yorke's name hasn't been on a subpar release since way back in 1993 (that'd be Radiohead's debut, Pablo Honey). At any rate, The Eraser is fairly uninteresting, one or two tracks aside, and not a particularly good addition to the Radiohead canon.

All of the nine songs are more or less interchangeable: electronic beats from the Autechre-for-Dummies book (Autechre's manager might want to check that beat from "The Clock" against Autechre's Tri Repetae++; there might be some royalties due), darkly ominous synths (and the occasional piano) from the Brian-Eno-for-Dummies book, and generic paranoid Radioheadisms like "There's no spark/No light in the dark," or "Time is running out for us," or "You will be dispensed with when you become inconvenient."

The most obvious reference point here is Radiohead's Kid A, but The Eraser lacks everything that made Kid A such a revelation: its genius wasn't about the newfound electronic backdrops, it was the sense of paranoia and isolation that permeated every note. It was about the meticulous production and performances that were mechanical and icy to the point of numbness, but always seemed to be on the verge of a complete breakdown. You can't phone that stuff in. Just as bands like Muse, Keane, and Kent have shown how easy it was to get everything entirely wrong with Radiohead's "rock" days of The Bends and Ok Computer, The Eraser shows how fine a line there is between Kid A-like brilliance and derivative mediocrity. I just never thought that the first person to corrupt Kid A's visionary foray into electronic pop would be Thom Yorke.

Happy Birthday Brian Wilson! A list to celebrate...

Since yesterday was the 64th birthday of Brian Wilson (who is obviously my favorite singer/songwriter/person), I thought I'd celebrate with a pointless list. This one took some thought to complete since there were so many brilliant options to choose from. But without further adieu, here are:

Tom's Personal Top 10 Favorite Beach Boys Songs

1. "God Only Knows" - If there's a more beautiful song in the world, I have yet to hear it. Carl's gorgeous vocal and Brian's gorgeous everything else (including the song, melody, harmonies, arrangement, etc., etc.) make for the most gorgeous sound recording in existence, as far as I'm concerned.
2. "Good Vibrations" - Brian's "pocket symphony." One of the most innovative, enduring, and popular songs ever recorded, and with good reason.
3. "Wouldn't It Be Nice" - There are two songs listed above this one on this list, but "Wouldn't It Be Nice" often strikes me as the perfect pop song. A melody to die for, surrounded by the most perfect arrangement and harmonies anybody could ask for. There are at least five different versions of this song on the Pet Sounds box set, a cappella, instrumental, outtakes, alternate versions, and everything, and every one of them is worth hearing to get a full picture of the construction of one of the most perfect songs ever recorded.
4. "Surfer Girl" - You could count on one hand the harmonies ever recorded that are more beautiful than this song (one or two of them might be on this list, in fact). Brian might have lifted the harmonic structure from the Four Freshmen, but they never achieved anything this brilliant.
5. "Surf's Up" - One of the few Beach Boys songs that can said to be a work of lyrical genius (thanks to the wonderful Van Dyke Parks), "Surf's Up" has little, if anything, in common with similarly titled works in the Beach Boys' catalog, other than that it's breathtakingly gorgeous. If you can find the version Brian recorded for Leonard Bernstein (just Brian and a piano), you won't be sorry.
6. "Don't Worry Baby" - Brian Wilson has stated many times that his favorite song ever is "Be My Baby" by the Ronettes (and more importantly, by Phil Spector). What better way to pay tribute to your favorite song than by simultaneously ripping it off and making it much better?
7. "Forever" - This one might have made the list due to sentimental value; when I saw Brian live, he sang this song, dedicating it to his deceased brother (who also happened to be the writer of the song), Dennis. Still though, it's a beautiful song about a beautiful feeling, with a wonderful melody, based around a simple chord progression. There wasn't a dry eye in the house when Brian played this song, and there probably wasn't when Dennis was alive to sing it either.
8. "Heroes and Villains" - Van Dyke Parks makes the list again as co-conspirator, writing the lyrics to this quaint tale of Old West swashbuckling. It's as close as the Beach Boys ever came to the avant-garde, touching simultaneously on decades-old Americana and the burgeoning psychedelic movement, not to mention some chromatic harmonies straight out of the Charles Ives playbook.
9. "California Girls" - Perhaps the quintessential Beach Boys song. Another brilliant melody from the height of the Beach Boys' popularity, this song was the rare culmination of everything that made them popular and everything that made them great artists at the same time. Many a person has tried to listen to this song without singing along. All have failed.
10. "All Summer Long" - This song was the real beginning of Brian's creative peak. For the first time, the Beach Boys made a clean break with both the Four Freshmen's harmonies and Chuck Berry's songs, and it resulted in this, a brilliant predecessor and foreshadower of what was to come 22 months (and five albums, with the pressure Capitol records put on them) later on Pet Sounds.


Runners up (because this list was hard to narrow down):

"Help Me Rhonda"
"Cabinessence"
"'Til I Die"
"Fun, Fun, Fun"
"Sail On, Sailor"

The Billy Preston Memorial Playlist

R.I.P.

1. Billy Preston - "That's the Way God Planned It"
2. The Rolling Stones - "Miss You"
3. Joe Cocker - "You Are So Beautiful"
4. Ringo Starr - "Only You (And You Alone)"
5. Sly and the Family Stone - "Family Affair"
6. John Lennon - "God"
7. George Harrison - "I Dig Love"
8. The Beatles - "Get Back"

Jim Noir

I recently wrote about how I usually expect music to be somewhat forward thinking and/or innovative or at least not a rehash of things done to death already, unless it sounds like 60's pop music. Well, here's my chance to put my money where my mouth is.

Jim Noir is a pop traditionalist, plain and simple. Don't be fooled by the synths and occasional programmed drums. The guy is stuck in 1966. Even the production and mixing of his debut record, Tower of Love, is in throwback mode. Drums in the left channel and vocals in the right? Has anybody done that on a record since the Beatles broke up? How about the "percussive" organ playing? That's a trick straight out of Brian Wilson's playbook (think "Good Vibrations"). "I Me You I'm Your" could fit right in on any Zombies record, and it's not hard to imagine "How to Be So Real" coming from somebody like Love.

Really, almost half the songs on Tower of Love could easily have been written by the Beatles. This is partly because they're so similar in harmonic structure and atmosphere, but also because they're just that good. I could spend all day saying which songs sound like which artists, but in the end, they're all keepers, and all brilliantly infectious. This is the best pure pop record I've heard in quite a long time. It's the record that Belle and Sebastian wish they could make. It's the feel-good sound of the summer.

And it's not even out in the United States yet! You all better be rushing to your closest record store on August 8.

Bush-bashing from Tom? Shocking!

One of the many things I've hated about the way George W. Bush has run the country is his tendency to make everything a black-and-white issue with no middle ground. You're with us or you're with the terrorists! You support my tax cuts or you're an evil tax-and-spend liberal! You support No Child Left Behind or you're against education! And so on and so forth. And what annoyed me almost as much is the number of people who bought it, dismissing guys like John Kerry as wishy-washy without actually realizing that what he was saying wasn't aimless and empty, it was just intelligent and nuanced.

So with that in mind, the irony presented in this article is almost too much for me.

Ahhhhh, sweet sweet schadenfreude.

Espers II

The new Espers album is called Espers II, but this is a misleading title for a couple reasons. For one, the band has doubled in size, and that never happens without a drastic change in sound. And as a result, Espers II doesn't really sound all that much like Espers did. The focus of the music has changed to a more group-vibe setting rather than focusing on the songs.

At any rate, this is one my most eagerly anticipated new albums, even more than the new Fiery Furnaces album. I happen to love the first Espers album, and the covers album The Weed Tree, and Greg Weeks' solo work, and I've written bits about them over and over and over and over and over.

So does it live up to my expectations? Not really, but how could it? It has real problems, though, not just failure to live up to unrealistic expectations.

For one thing, almost half of the album is filled with what can only be described as "jamming." Granted, it sounds like no Phish record you've ever heard. Maybe "freakout" would be a better term for it, in the psychedelic tradition of Syd Barrett or Jorma Kaukonen. But the Espers version of it is a plodding, dirge-like march of dread and sadness, filled out by acid guitar leads, droning vintage synthesizers, and amplified cello. This is interesting sometimes, as in the opener "Dead Queen," but eventually just gets boring, as in "Dead King." (No typos in there, "Dead Queen" and "Dead King" are both songs on the album.)

There are many fantastic moments on Espers II. "Dead Queen" has the airy sense of timelessness that was found on their first album. The folkier side also comes out for "Children of Stone," which is one of the most beautiful songs I've heard in a long time.

The best moments, though, are songs like "Widow's Weed" and "Moon Occults the Sun." These songs represent something of a step toward the evolution of folk music into something that's definitely folk, but definitely a step beyond, not quite into rock, but into something altogether new, with all the crawling apocalyptic gloom of Godspeed You Black Emperor! or A Silver Mt. Zion. Call it post-folk.

Overall, I'm not entirely sure if I like the new direction Espers have taken. It's occasionally exquisite, but somewhat inconsistent. Maybe the kinks will be worked out by their next album, because it still sounds like they're getting used to playing with actual drums sometimes. And Otto (the drummer) sounds like he's still figuring out where he fits in.

Final verdict: Espers II is a transitional album, a step in a new direction, but they haven't quite arrived at their destination. I'll value it for its many great moments, and look forward to seeing what they can do in the future.