Notofu.com: The Fiery Furnaces
Published by: Notofu.com
Date: December 2, 2009
Format: Web (www.notofu.com)
Type: Music Review
The Fiery Furnaces – Take Me Round Again
It’s natural for bands, while writing songs, to deconstruct them, to try them this way or that way, and to generally fuss with them until they are happy with the end result. This process was highlighted at extremes in Wilco’s 2002 documentary, I’m Trying to Break Your Heart, where at One point, Jeff Tweedy says, “It’s a constant process… you have a million options as to what [a record] can be and what shape it can be… There’s no reason at all to not destroy it. We made it, so it’s ours to destroy and that’s liberating and exciting in a really creative way.”
On Take Me Round Again: The Friedbergers cover the Friedbergers, Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger have deconstructed, edited, added, morphed and modified songs that previously appeared on 2009’s I’m Going Away. As the band puts it on their website, “All that remains the same are the words.”
The first two tracks on Take Me Round Again are the two members’ different versions of the title track on I’m Going Away. The record opens with Matthew’s take on the track, which is built around Rhodes piano, strings and vocals. The percussion that characterized the original version is absent completely and the pace is slowed dramatically. Next is Eleanor’s version of the same song. She relies mainly only her voice and a soft acoustic guitar as the base of the song. Again, she slows the song down by a large margin. Both interpretations are loose at best, but that’s why they work. They are new songs, inspired by the original. If they were too similar, they wouldn’t seem to be much of a point to them. The record continues with new versions of songs that are different enough to warrant listening and then going back and comparing them to their original forms.
The two recorded each of their six songs separately, in different parts of the country (Michigan and New York), giving Eleanor’s songs a unique sound, different from the sound that Matthew achieved with his. Eleanor’s tend to have nuances of lo-fi home recordings, where Matthew’s sound a bit more polished.
Take Me Round Again gives listeners a peek behind the curtain for a glimpse of the inner workings of The Fiery Furnaces, it accentuates Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger’s separate and individual personalities and it gives fans a preview of what stylistically could possiby be in the future of an already diverse band.
3.5/5