Primer: Fiery Furnaces Part 4- Rehearsing My Choir

I've always admired artists who can throw their audience a total curveball. They zig when you think they're going to zag. An actor known for comedies makes some serious films. A writer known for transgressive fiction does a ghost story. And a band known for highly conceptual and idiosyncratic experimental pop music produces what amounts to a radioplay about their Grandma, who takes over lead vocals. Uhhh, right.

On second thought, Rehearsing My Choir shouldn't have been that much of a stretch. Blueberry Boat has some kind of story, but it jumps around so much and goes on so many tangents that don't seem to fit in anywhere that the average person will never notice or care. So while you could healthily ignore Blueberry Boat's story and still enjoy it, Rehearsing My Choir forces its story upon you. Indeed, it's the very point of the album--something about the Friedberger siblings' Grandmother's life. However, it's perversely told out of order, so piecing it out is only slightly easier than Blueberry Boat.

That's my main problem with the album right there: it's more concerned with telling a story than it is featuring great music, and it doesn't do storytelling very well. Rehearsing My Choir is the wordiest Fiery Furnaces album by a large margin, and most of that verbiage comes from the spoken word of Grandma Furnace. I don't have anything against her voice, but since you're rarely more than 30 seconds time without it, it's a love it or hate it proposition. Though Eleanor sings in her usual sweet way, this time out she contrasts too sharply with her Grandmother instead of blending nicely with her sibling. At any rate, I defy anyone who isn't a member of the Friedberger family to care about and piece together the "plot", so to speak.

The other problem I have with the album is that it's just not very good as a musical piece. Since all of the instrumentation is in the service of the story, nothing can live on its own or produce memorable melodies that aren't welded roughly to seemingly endless sentences of exposition. Ever ytime I've listened to the album, only bits and pieces stand out to me; never whole songs, and never anytime when the Grandmother or Eleanor are singing. The crazy keyboard freakout toward the end of 'Slavin' Away' is, frankly, awesome, but things like this are too few. You may have noticed that I'm not discussing the songs or music much in this review, but they don't especially matter. Rehearsing My Choir is like one giant slab of pianos, keyboards, drums, and guitars; though the basic tools are the same ones used in previous Fiery Furnace releases, they don't produce anything exceptional musically other than frustrating snippets like the one I just mentioned.

I can't imagine Rehearsing My Choir being anyone's favorite Fiery Furnaces album. I wouldn't say it's especially difficult or experimental; there are many, many albums and pieces of music that are, and make Rehearsing My Choir seem like the first few Beatles albums. In its defense, Rehearsing My Choir is an interesting listen. It's not the utter disaster I sometimes make it out to be; it is worth hearing at least twice all the way through before one makes up one's mind. But that's the thing...

Rehearsing My Choir still doesn't strike me as good or even great. It sounds similar to other Fiery Furnace releases, but as it's an attempt at a radioplay, you can't divorce the story from the setting. I find it more interesting to talk about the album than it is to listen to it, and even then, I think the way it tells the story is willfully obscure and hard to enjoy. Basically, Rehearsing My Choir fails both to tell a story well and to produce good music. It's not crap but it's easily the worst Fiery Furnaces album.