Give this record a 9 out of 10 if you’re a critic who writes for a pretentious arty zine. Rate it at 6 if you’re a regular joe who just wants to shake your ass. It’s a 3 if you’re looking for rock, pop, or, for that matter, music of any definable genre. Give it an 8 or above if you’re patient and open-minded enough to embrace a bizarre, quirky, and surprising musical adventure unlike any you’ve had before.
Like most, I started listening to Blueberry Boat because of the critics who gushed about it as a brilliant and complex masterpiece, the “Alice in Wonderland” of progressive indie. I had also heard that not everyone who tried to listen to it all the way through, without being wasted, had survived, so I considered it a personal challenge.
On my first try I actually got through about four songs. Pretty good I thought – many didn’t make it that far. Second try, seven songs. I left it alone for a few days and didn’t care much whether I ever picked it up again. Finally, I came back to it and the third time was a charm – all 76 minutes under my belt, and now it was time to ask myself just what the hell was the point of this squealing, cooing, noisy, quiet, restless, unpredictable agglomeration of sound, and whether I actually enjoyed it.
I decided that what Fiery Furnaces does best is exemplified by passages like the moment at about 2:34 in the track ‘1917’ (roughly the exact middle point of the song). This is what’s happening: an unsettling, all too Velvet Underground-y spoken word piece set to cacophonic and sporadic noise suddenly recedes, radically metamorphosing into a sublime, heartfelt piano composition. This transformation from caterpillar to butterfly and back takes place dozens of times on this album. What it reveals is the conflict between consonance and dissonance, pop and fuzz, that has captivated indie artists for at least twenty years now. But unlike in canonical works like, say, Psychocandy, the two extremes are not layered on top of each other vertically, they are shelved next to each other horizontally.
Importantly, despite having the feel of a hastily glued together collage, this is not just unpredictability for unpredictability's sake. Rather, it's setting you up to feel the music more, by contrast with what preceded it. Ever listen to an Elliott Smith album all the way through and it feels painfully desolate and lonely for the first few tracks (as Elliott brilliantly did), but by the end you're apathetic, doing the dishes or playing Game Cube? FF is not going to do that to you. This is not a simple language, created then repeated, as is the work of most pop musicians. Here, nothing is taken for granted, so when beauty rises up out of the filth it's so much more recognizable as such; indeed, that's what makes it beautiful.
Blueberry Boat is also emphatically a music of its time – or, more precisely, against its time. The suddenness of the unannounced, drastic changes in meter, instrumentation, tempo, vocals, and everything else is a spectacular middle finger not only to me and anyone else trying to write a short review of the album, but to the whole Internet audio generation. FF is telling you that if you think you can size up a band by listening to a 30 second streamed sample, or listen to a single and reduce its sound to the sum of its influences, you can't (Sonic Youth + Os Mutantes + ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ somehow seems sorely inadequate here). Instead, this is meant to shock you out of every way you’ve ever learned how to evaluate music: is a given track going to get one star or five on your iPod? And if you’re such a great critic, is the album’s rating a 9, 6, 3, or 8?
It’s all of the above, and less, and more. |