The Fiery Furnaces @ the Black Cat

Before The Fiery Furnaces took the stage, roadies taped down setlists in plain view of the front row. Few surprises were ruined, however: as we were about to find out, the night’s setlist listed only points of departure, not destinations. The band has recently returned to a live format that they often used when touring on Blueberry Boat: playing extended medleys consisting of jumbled up versions of various songs from the band’s catalog. "We take bits of one song and stick it on another," songwriter Matthew Friedberger told me in an interview a few years back. "It lets us re-imagine the songs." A ten-minute long session during such a show might consist of the verse from one song and the chorus from another, lyrics sung to a completely different melody and tempo and familiar tunes adapted to a new style — all played back-to-back in a manic, hyper-active fashion. You might say that a Fiery Furnaces show has the same allure as a house of mirrors: half the fun is seeing how the songs get twisted, warped and reshaped in their new context.

Taking the stage set against a backdrop of their own lyrics (what do you expect from a band whose very name is an alliterative reference to both the Book of Daniel and William Blake?), the Furnaces started the night off with a rendition of the title track from Bitter Tea. Armed with drummer Bob D’Amico on a trap set and Michael Goodman on an array of percussion instruments, including numerous cowbells and bongos, the band sounded like a live version of the Salsa preset on a battery-powered Casio keyboard. Upon arriving at the chorus, the band suddenly turned a corner, landing in the middle of “I’m In No Mood.” Wearing a suede cowboy jacket that looked more like a boy’s Halloween costume, vocalist Eleanor Friedberger belted out the coda with the perfect diction of an elocution student: “I was so drunk last night/I didn’t even undress for bed/And the pin in my hair was still stuck in my head.”

If the Fiery Furnaces are a “difficult” band on record, they must be an impossible band live, dangling hooks like carrots and always keeping them just out of reach. When the band segued into excellent early single “Here Comes the Summer” in the middle of an extended medley, the die hard fans in the front row rejoiced and threw up their hands. At the end of the verse, however, the band slowed their tempo, subverting the song’s catchy melody to make way for a carnival organ bridge. Swashbuckling epic “Blueberry Boat” was sabotaged in a similar manner but featured an excellent breakdown that found Eleanor nearly rapping over a single, repeating organ chord (“You see, I’m from Grand Rapids and up my way/we grow the best blueberries in the U.S. of A.”). Early single “Tropical Ice-Land” was neigh unrecognizable save for the lyrics but the brief segment of “Spaniolated” that followed was straightforward enough to balance it out. And “Single Again” could have been a pop gem worthy of its name but Eleanor raced through the lyrics on the verse so fast that they sounded like tongue twisters, Matthew chasing her with organ notes all the while.

One of the more successful pairings of the night was an amalgam of two of Bitter Tea’s stronger songs: the verses of “Police Sweater Blood Vow” fused with the chorus of “Teach Me Sweetheart”. Church hall organ traded off with guitarist Jason Loewenstein’s jangly power chords, the whole package driven home with some propulsive drums. The first few lines of “Waiting to Know You” also worked quite well when rolled into a version of “The Vietnamese Telephone Ministry” that sounded like the theme to a 70s cop drama.

While there’s no denying that the Fiery Furnaces are an interesting, energetic and inventive live band, I would be lying if I said that Friday night’s hour-long set was enjoyable in its entirety. Some pairings worked better than others but few segments lasted longer than a TV commercial—meaning that missteps were kept mercifully short. The downside is that the sonic experiments that did work were equally fleeting, none of them lingering long enough to plant a melody in your head. Much has been made of the Friedbergers’ subversion of their own pop instincts; the accepted explanation is that writing good pop singles is simply too easy for a band like the Furnaces — a band that seemingly views songwriting as a challenge rather than a means of emotional expression. It’s easy to see how a virtuosic exercise like rearranging songs on the fly keeps the band interested live — I’m just not sure that it always serves the same purpose for the audience. Then again, this is the Fiery Furnaces that we’re talking about: if you still consider yourself a fan after all these years, you’re pretty much asking for it.

Photos by Mehan Jayasuriya