It seems The Fiery Furnaces whole purpose in life is to confound expectations. After releasing the critically acclaimed (but widely misunderstood) 2004 avant-schizoid-pop get-it-or-don’t album Blueberry Boat, they went and recorded a sprawling concept album entitled Rehearsing My Choir about their grandmother – with their grandmother on guest vocals – to near complete critical derision (although, it has to be said, I think it’s great and actually far more accessible than Blueberry Boat). At the same time, they recorded Bitter Tea, which is a more logical successor to Blueberry Boat, except more bleepy-synthy-poppy (insofar as the songs have a recognisable structure) and with around 50% of the vocal parts recorded backwards.
So, obviously, when playing live, they tour as a White Stripes-esque garage-psychadelia-prog-blues-rock band, reducing their 11-minute sprawling operettas down to 3-minute blistering aural assaults. That’s not to say the songs aren’t recognisable – all the hooks and riffs from the originals are there, and the lyrics and melodies (insofar as there are any) are still broadly the same – but they’ve sped everything up by a factor of two, changed all the time signatures and stripped all the keyboard and synth parts out.
And – and this is the crazy thing – after all of this, they’re still completely recognisable: if you ‘got’ Blueberry Boat, this all made perfect sense. It would be very nearly impossible to recreate their recorded and produced schizophrenic pop sound on stage – so they don’t even try. Instead, they strip everything back to basics and then go at it all cylinders blazing. And it works brilliantly.
You’ve never heard anything quite like them, but really, you owe it to yourself to give them a go. They’re really quite something.