Album of the Week/Primer: Fiery Furnaces Part 7- Widow City

A cursory glance at Metacritic reveals that most of the Fiery Furnaces albums have almost exactly the same average score, with the highest placing contender being Gallowsbird's Bark. I bring this up because it's the least representative Furnaces album and also the most out-and-out rocking, so apparently what the majority of people like about the band is the times they play it more straightforward and break out the guitars. Which brings us to Widow City, a puzzlingly underrated album.

Widow City gives us the best of both worlds: it's got the usual Fiery Furnaces tricks up its sleeve--unconventional, suite-like songs, strange keyboard flourishes and sounds, fascinatingly wordy lyrics, etc.--but it also thoroughly brings back the rock that we've only seen bits and pieces of since the first two albums. 'Clear Signal From Cairo', in its winding six minute duration, moves from city leveling riffs to fugue-like repetitions of the melody to breath-taking full stop rest breaks with Eleanor. Much has been made of Widow City being the band's 70s album, but I don't know that I've heard anything from that decade that sounds quite like 'Navy Nurse', which starts with what could possibly be a huge Led Zeppelin guitar-and-drum riff before coasting into a willowy pop section with (almost) funky keyboards--and back again. Then there's 'The Old Hag Is Sleeping', where the new addition of the Chamberlin organ (a kind of Mellotron-ish instrument) comes to the full fore, with animal sounds used as instruments.

The thing that will immediately stick out about Widow City is how different it sounds from previous Furnaces releases, though you may not know exactly why it is yet. During the recording of the album, touring drummer Bob D'Amico joined the band in the studio, instead of the usual "Matt Friedberger plays everything and Eleanor sings almost everything" set up they had been going with. This results in something other reviewers have sometimes mentioned: a more "live" sounding album. If the Fiery Furnaces haven't sounded this heavy and rocking for a long time, it's largely because the drums are usually not synthesized like they often were in the past. On its own, this doesn't make the album better, but when you've also got Matt getting on the guitar more often than he has for awhile, it adds up to a rocking, lively album.

Lively is a good word for Widow City, because I don't remember having this much fun listening to a Fiery Furnaces album in a long time. On first listen it sounded like the strongest thing they'd done Blueberry Boat, and a few months of listening have borne this out. I attribute this both to the aforementioned rocking/liver sound and to the best and most memorable set of songs they've released since Blueberry Boat. 'Wicker Whatnots' is lucid fun, with a ferocious guitar/keyboard line, scattershot drums, and a jungle percussion break that slithers out of nowhere and back before you have time to smile. 'The Philadelphia Grand Jury', like 'Quay Cur' off of Blueberry Boat, is the first and longest track, a genuine classic Fiery Furnaces epic for voice, Chamberlin, guitar, drums, keyboards, bass, and whatever else they feel like throwing in. What initially seem like arbitrary and shiftless section changes reveal themselves, in that patented Fiery Furnaces way, to be bite sized delights that eventually form a larger chunk of deliciousness.

If I've not made it clear by now, Widow City is my favorite Fiery Furnaces album after Blueberry Boat. In time it may even surpass that ship in my heart. Ultimately it shouldn't matter, because they're both amazing, brilliant albums that deserve wider recognition.

Primer: Fiery Furnaces Part 5- Bitter Tea

After the frustrating Rehearsing My Choir album, I probably would have taken any subsequent release from the Fiery Furnaces as a return to form. Funny, then, that Bitter Tea was apparently recorded around the same time as that album and intended as a companion piece--though for the life of me I don't know why, since it's nothing like Rehearsing My Choir and would only serve as a palette cleanser.

I suppose, then, that's always been my assessment of Bitter Tea. It initially struck me as mediocre and confused, but with a year or two behind it, Bitter Tea stands as the great album it always was. So, why couldn't I see it at first?? Partially it was because it followed Rehearsing My Choir and I thought of it as an "OK, they haven't totally lost the plot" kind of apologetic release. Which it isn't, but I'll get to that in a bit.

Mostly I thought of it as confused and mediocre because of the heavy emphasis on keyboards and experimental backwards vocal conceits. The songs of Bitter Tea are every bit as good as Blueberry Boat when I consider them piece by piece, but as a whole they don't have the same transcendent feeling. I think that's because there's not enough guitars on this album. Not that other Furnace albums didn't have mounds of keyboards, but they also rocked out from time to time. Bitter Tea could almost qualify as their new wave album, if I were so inclined to label it. At the same time, it's their backwards vocal funhouse album.

Please remember that I have nothing against backwards vocals: I actually love Pullhair Rubeye unlike seemingly the rest of the world. But too often bands use it for self consciously difficult reasons, and your mileage will vary. On Bitter Tea, it only seems to work when it isn't the central function of the song. 'Vietnamese Telephone Ministry' irritates me because it's almost six minutes of dueling backwards and forwards vocals, mutated keyboards, and skittering drums; it never congeals into anything other than "my, that was a neat experiment...what's the next song??" Six other songs from the album use backwards effects, but since they don't feature them so prominently, they work. They pop up in the beginning of 'Oh Sweet Woods' and are peppered throughout, for example, but the grooving dance beats and sweet acoustic guitar instrumentation are at the heart of the song, not a bunch of gibberish.

I apologize for the abrupt transition (though in retrospect it's apropos for the Fiery Furnaces), but I want to get back to my original point about this being a palette cleansing, apologetic release. Since Bitter Tea sounds closest in spirit and sonics to Blueberry Boat, its lasting impression on me was always that of a safe album, a reminder to us of why we loved the band in the first place. Well, it does remind us of why we loved them, but that's due to its own merits and not its adherence to Blueberry Boat blueprints. In the end, it wasn't so much a palette cleanser as it helps isolate Rehearsing My Choir as the oddity in the Fiery Furnaces' discography, doubly so because it was recorded at the same time as that album. How different would feelings for both be if their releases were switched, and Bitter Tea came out after Blueberry Boat and EP??

There's a lot to say about the album that has nothing to do with the music, and I feel bad about that. Here I am six paragraphs in and I've only scraped the surface!! Well, let me just jump into it: 'Police Sweater Blood Vow' is another oddly perfect Fiery Furnaces pop song that could've easily fit into the latter half of Bluebery Boat, with a joyous "vibrate buzz buzz ring and beep/tell me babe what time is it now??" chorus. The first four songs build up steam in a near-suite of energy that releases in the ballad punch of 'Teach Me Sweetheart', truly one of Eleanor's best vocal performances on record. Finally, there's 'Nevers', which works wonders with the backwards vocal shtick by switching back and forth between regular and backwards seemingly word by word, before repeating the melody of the song in constantly mutating ways. Too bad, then, that two songs are repeated in different mixes at the end of the album. This sort of thing always bugged me about The Soft Bulletin by the Flaming Lips, too. But I digress.

I feel as though I've said so much about Bitter Tea and yet not enough. But then again, that goes for every Fiery Furnaces release--they're as fun to talk about as they are to listen to. But all that really matters is that, once all the equations were figured and votes tallied, Bitter Tea still stands as a great Fiery Furnaces album: nothing more, and nothing less.

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.

Primer: Fiery Furnaces Part 3- EP

I'm resisting the urge to begin my review by making the obvious joke about how the Fiery Furnaces are so long winded their EPs are as long as another band's album...and I suppose I just did. Regardless, it's hard to know what to make, conceptually, of this release. The EP label may be an ironic one by a band who've always had more of a sense of humor than we give them credit for, but it's also misleading label, too.

So, then: after releasing Blueberry Boat the Fiery Furnaces had a handful of singles that predated it which either never saw release in the U.S. or were largely ignored. As demand for new product arose after everybody lost their collective minds over their second album, the band and/or their record label decided to compile a stop-gap release until the next album(s). The term "stop-gap" release is a loaded one, weighted down with negative connotations of shoveling a bunch of crap together into a pile to exploit cash soaked fans, but let me assure you that EP is a substantial release in its own right, and the one thing we'd heard before--'Tropical Ice-Land', here spelled 'Tropical-Iceland'--appears in a different form.

I've long wrestled with the idea of which Fiery Furnaces release makes for the best introduction to the band. I tend to just want to foist Blueberry Boat unto their plate and tell them to eat until they get it. However, in listening to EP in the context of the rest of the band's discography, it's easily the most compact and digestible meal to be had. At only 10 songs and 40ish minutes, it's almost like an appetizer to whet one's appetite for the full(er) albums.

As for the music, well, it steers carefully toward the pop side of the Furnaces' persona. While there are touches of the experimentation and song suite stylings from Blueberry Boat, they are largely kept in check by sweet melodies and strong songwriting. 'Cousin Chris' is pretty unorthodox, but the burbling keyboard parts and the Friedberger siblings syrupy vocals help the medicine go down. Meanwhile, all the restraint has been stripped from the aforementioned 'Tropical Ice-Land': in its 'Tropical-Iceland' revision, it's a surging new wave rocker, much zestier but less filling. If there's a weak spot here, it's 'Sweet Spots', which sounds and feels like a transitional song between Gallowsbird's Bark and Blueberry Boat but doesn't top or even equal anything from those two albums; instead, it's a chugging, repetitive number with "yeah yeah" refrains that feel apathetic and thrown together. Thankfully, the rest of the release is ace, including 'Duffer St. George', which sets its chorus to the tune of "Jimmy cracked corn and I don't care" (or whatever that 'song' is called) and is gleeful fun because of it.

Really, you can't go wrong with EP. It's equivalent to a full album for the price of an EP (roughly $10 last time I checked), and it will please diehard fans as well as it does newcomers.

Album of the Week/Primer: Fiery Furnaces Part 2: Blueberry Boat

There comes a point in any great band's life where they make that huge artistic leap and manage to create a work that is both the best thing they've ever done and something that seemingly points in infinite directions for the future. Sometimes this happens before a band releases anything so that their debut album is their huge leap. Other times it happens an album or more into the band's career. Then there's freaks like Radiohead who've made artistic leaps at least twice.

With Blueberry Boat, the Fiery Furnaces made this leap. While Gallowsbird's Bark and the singles that would make up the eventual EP release were great in their own way, they don't hold a candle to the consistency, freshness, and utter genius of this album.

Blueberry Boat was, for me, the sort of album you hear and remember why you love music, and the album format specifically, so much. None of these songs could work on their own, but if listened to as a whole, they form a brilliant suite of songs that melt into each other or rapidly jump between themes back and forth like hopscotch.

The easiest way I can think of to explain the greatness of the album is to use a formula: take the revolutionary song suite 'A Quick One While He's Away' by the Who, add to it Gallowbird's Bark's last three tracks (which segue together like a trio suite), and multiply by inspiration. The music is largely similar to the instrumentation found on the Furnaces' first album, with guitars, keyboards, pianos, drums, various percussive instruments, and oddities like sitars (or so I'm told, I'd have never figured it out on my own). However, things are taken to a ridiculously fun extreme on this album--this is really the point where the band's keyboard obsession made itself known, but in a good way. Unlike later releases which could be too keyboard heavy, Blueberry Boat gets the balance right and remembers to rock out every so often.

The album is ostensibly a concept album about somebody sailing a ship with a cargo of blueberries--actually, I'm not sure what the story is supposed to be, but you don't need to even care to appreciate the album. I've made this metaphor before, but listening to Fiery Furnace albums is like taking shots of liquor. You just have to jump in and hang on for the ride, trusting the band's instincts and having a good time (if any is to be had...we'll get to Rehearsing My Choir some other time). In fact, that concept of "fun" is what initially struck me about the album the first time I heard it--the way the songs flow into each other or juxtapose elements, all the while with great melodies and strong songwriting, makes for one of the most joyously fun indie rock albums I've ever heard.

I'm going to feel like a broken record by the time I get to Widow City, but the problems you may or may not have with Blueberry Boat are universal to all Fiery Furnace releases. Yes, it's long: just over 75 minutes. Yes, it's complex: the first song, 'Quay Cur', is over 10 minutes in length and is an overwhelming way to start the album. Yes, it's pretentious: the lyrics are frequently wordy and bookish. However, as a fan, I don't see these things as bad. It's more that certain albums are good enough to make you forget or outright appreciate these elements. Blueberry Boat never overstays its welcome for me; I love every song and find it hard to stop listening to it once I've started. The complexity also isn't bad. Sometimes you need to give an album a few spins to learn its logic and sense of itself to anticipate changes and song sections that initially seemed chaotic and random, but will eventually seem perfectly placed. As for the pretentiousness, well, I happen to like smart lyrics that mention, say, obscure elements of history or science, so I've got no problem there.

While I am stressing the suite-like, long, and complicated nature of the songs for good reason, the latter half of the album features a few sweet, short, and unpretentious pop songs. 'Birdie Brain' is on par with 'Tropical Ice-land' from the first album as one of the finest songs they've yet written, and every time it gets to the part where the male Friedberger sibling takes over vocals for the "I've been told the branch of the stream..." bit, I get chills. Similarly, 'Turning Round' is a gorgeous late album impressionistic piece like 'Cry Baby Cry' off the White Album, and something I almost always try to work into mixtapes because I love it that much. Lastly, 'Spaniolated' is a shimmery mid-tempo ballad-like tune with a melancholy tinge that quotes the childhood couplet "the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain."

I would go into the longer songs, but frankly it would ruin the fun of listening to the album. Suffice it to say that, while I certainly love the other Fiery Furnace albums (again, other than Rehearsing My Choir) they just don't do it as well or as consistently as Blueberry Boat. It is exceedingly rare that a band's most complex and long winded album is their best, but such is the magic of Blueberry Boat. Go buy this album now.

Primer: Fiery Furnaces Part 1- Gallowsbird's Bark

The Fiery Furnaces make for one of the more fascinating stories in indie rock, emerging into our consciousness on the wave of the early 00's garage rock boom, settling into critical darling status with 2004's Blueberry Boat, blowing it with Rehearsing My Choir, and recovering with Bitter Tea and Widow City. At the same time, their music is equally...ok, realistically, the music is much, much more fascinating than the story behind it, a sound that is by turns complex and simple, catchy and obtuse, retro and futuristic.

For all the talk--and boasting from Matt Friedberger--about how prolific the band is, the Fiery Furnaces have only released 5 albums in the past 6 years (one more if you count the EP release, two more if you count Matt's solo double album). And it all began with 2003's Gallowsbird's Bark, a release that at the time made sense in the context of the White Stripes/Strokes/The Hives garage band era of the early years of this decade. Looking back now, though, the Fiery Furnaces were always weirder and more diverse than their contemporaries. Certainly I don't want to make the impression that Gallowsbird's Bark is as strange as what was to come, but it's also misleading to call it garage rock. Though it does have far more guitars and shorter songs than any other Fiery Furnaces release, it still has a hefty dose of trademark keyboards, songwriting twists, and wordy, book-ish lyrics.

The main thing that strikes me about the album now is how close it sounds to future Fiery Furnaces releases. The common consensus that this is their "rock" album or their "pop" album (or both) is mostly true, but it's still far from something as accessible and populist as the contemporary releases from the Strokes or Fiery Furnaces. I've been listening to the Fiery Furnace albums as a patchwork quilt for a week or so now, and Gallowsbird's Bark doesn't stand out as much as you might think. Witness a song like 'Two Fat Feet': sure, it's got the sludgy garage rock guitar riff, but it's also got a flirty, fancy piano/keyboard line and lyrics that include the word "snaggletooth." Then there's 'Inca Rag/Name Game', effectively two seamless songs in one, which--as every review probably will mention--points the way to the genius song suites of Blueberry Boat.

Speaking of which, the final three songs of the album are one of the finest things the band has ever done. A true link to Blueberry Boat, 'Tropical Ice-land', 'Rub-Alcohol Blues', and 'We Got Back The Plague' are a continuous trio of songs, each every bit as distinct as the others and yet fitting together perfectly. 'Tropical Ice-land' in particular deserves praise as both a fan favorite and one of their best songs, so much so that an alternate "single" version appears on the EP release. I prefer this version over that peppy, new wave rave up. It starts with a melancholy, complicated guitar line after a false start and then the glorious lyrics begin under a swath of gauzy acoustic guitars. The beautiful refrain will stick in your head for days--sing it with me: "tropical icey icey"--and the odd chirping sounds and stray percussive touches will remind you that, even at their pop-iest, there is always more going on than there seems in Fiery Furnaces land.

On its own, Gallowsbird's Bark is an incredible album. The only problem I have with it is that, while it's only around 46 minutes long, it's also 16 songs and so it always feels longer than it is. This is a problem common to all Fiery Furnaces releases, though in latter cases it will be because they actually are long albums. Anyway, on its own the album is great and still the best place to enter the Fiery Furnaces world. However, in terms of the band's discography, it's only above Rehearsing My Choir in my estimation. That's not to say it's a bad album or even a bad Fiery Furnaces album; I think I've made that clear enough. But, what's still to come--which I will get to in time--is exponentially more interesting and rewarding.

Reassessing Bad Albums For Fun and No Profit

Though reviews and criticism are ultimately subjective, certain consensuses are often reached. Whether it’s that such and such an album is the best thing a band has yet done or that it merely points the way to better things, if you read enough reviews of an album you begin to notice a collective assessment of it. And so, you often find albums agreed upon as disappointing, sophomore slumps, vanity/indulgence releases, etc. (Please note that I don’t mean out-and-out shitty albums, because there’s rarely much to reassess about them) Some of these are due as much to critical shortsightedness and misunderstanding as they are to the artists themselves.

Anyway, let’s reassess some of the more recent offenders, shall we??

The Album: Some Loud Thunder by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

The Offenses: Being too experimental; sounding too influenced by producer David Fridmann; having songwriting that classifies as spotty and weak.

The Reassessment: Some Loud Thunder is neither a secret masterpiece nor a total failure. It rests somewhere in between the two extremes, though I’d honestly say I liked it a lot better when I came back to it a few months after its release. Yes, it’s not as good as their debut, but it’s still a great album. It’s the difference between an A research paper and a B one, really.

The Album: Rehearsing My Choir by the Fiery Furnaces

The Offenses: Being a kind of radioplay/concept album/autobiography about the Furnace siblings’s Grandmother; being extraordinarily self indulgent; not working as an album or a musical; mostly featuring the vocal stylings of said Grandmother, which could be charitably described as “not very good and not befitting the music.”

The Reassessment: I’ve only managed to make it all the way through the album twice, if that tells you anything. Fiery Furnace albums are sort of like taking a shot of liquor: you just have to jump in and do it. Man up, as they say. Yes, their albums are overlong, complicated, and messy, but if you take the plunge and trust their instincts—as well as giving each album your full attention span for its run time—you are always rewarded. Rehearsing My Choir does not reward you, sadly. It’s more like taking a shot of liquor that you can’t quite get down because it turns out it was moonshine: it’s simply too much. Though every Fiery Furnaces album will inevitably be described as “great but just not as great as Blueberry Boat”, one can also safely say that everything they’ve released since and could possibly release in the future will be better and less indulgent than Choir.

The Album: Do The Collapse by Guided By Voices

The Offenses: Being a slicked up, overproduced GBV album; having weak songwriting; being a failed attempt at a major label debut and subsequently getting released on, oddly, industrial powerhouse TVT records; the-one-dude-from-the-Cars produced it and stipulated that the band couldn’t drink during its creation (seriously).

The Reassessment: The only song I can remember from the album is the opener, ‘Teenage FBI.’ Basically, Do The Collapse is like your least favorite album by your favorite band. There still remains all the things you love about them, but it still feels weak or a like mess or a misstep. And Do The Collapse is all three. And the “no drinking” thing just kind of pisses me off, frankly, because if you’ve ever seen or heard about a GBV show, you know that the drunker they get, the better they get. See their final show, captured on The Electrifying Conclusion DVD, for a good example.

The Album: It’s All Around You by Tortoise

The Offenses: Being a more-of-the-same, diminishing-returns kind of album; increasingly making the band into a Steely Dan-esque perfectionist studio beast without any blood.

The Reassessment: It’s All Around You is more of the same, with one or two twists—wordless vocals on ‘The Lithium Stiffs’, the noisy drum nightmare of ‘Dot/Eyes’—that are worth hearing for fans. Otherwise, it’s an entirely unnecessary and skippable release by a band who seem to have increasingly less ideas. And they desperately need to introduce some spontaneity and grit into their sound, because they’re beginning to sound like an austere museum piece.

The Album: NYC Ghosts & Flowers by Sonic Youth

The Offenses: Being too minimalist and noodle-y in some places, too self consciously noisy in others; having bad beat poetry for lyrics; being recorded after most of the band’s custom gear was stolen; representing the end-of-the-line if you didn’t like their 90s output.

The Reassessment: While being the weakest album the band have released in the past 15 years—actually, it’s more like “weakest album ever”—it’s still interesting and worth a few listens. Some of the lyrics are indeed embarrassing, but the music and overall sound of the album fascinate me in some strange way. It’s another side of a fascinating and still vibrant band that you may or may not like; you can say a lot of things about Sonic Youth and their development over the years, but they haven’t fallen into an old age trap of releasing boring, forgettable crap like, say…REM. Speaking of the devil…

The Album: Everything REM has released since at least New Adventures In Hi-Fi.

The Offenses: It’s sad to think that about a decade ago, people used to look forward to REM albums with the same fervor as they now do Radiohead ones. Yet in the past ten(+) years, the band has squandered their good standing with a string of releases that are utterly boring and unmemorable to the point that I can’t even distinguish them from each other. Sure, there are one or two good songs per album, but by and large, I sometimes forget the band hasn’t broken up already.

The Reassessment: Every time a new REM album comes out, some reviewer or critic will say it’s the beginning of a new creative phase in the band’s life. Or that such and such an album was a secret masterpiece, and we were all wrong to hate/ignore it. But…they’re all wrong. I want to be charitable to the band because they have released some amazing, timeless music, but they haven’t done this since the beginning of Clinton’s second term. My good faith has long since gone. Fuck REM.