Fiery Furnaces are a brother/sister duo from Illinois, and they are trying to drive you crazy.
Their 2003 breakout album, Blueberry Boat, was a self-consciously kooky blast of indie-folk, spilling over with offbeam melodies and lyrical whimsy.
Some listeners fell hopelessly for its lazy-faced quirkiness. Others, puzzled that a band would disavow conventional song structure when they clearly had nothing better to replace it with, loathed the LP vehemently.
The Friedberger siblings' new record Rehearsing My Choir pines to be taken more seriously. It is a conceptual oddity and work of stunning presumtiveness, based on the life-cycle of the Friedbergers’ maternal grandmother, Olga Sarantos.
Most songwriters would blanche at hanging an entire album on the reminiscings of an elderly relative. The Fiery Furnaces push further than that. They have recruited Ms Sarantos as a spoken word performer.
This sounds absurd and, in practice, proves nearly unlistenable. As Sarantos dribbles and coos, guitarist Matthew Friedberger drops discordant non-song fragments and sister Maria sings in a semi-coherent whisper.
Cumulatively, the listener begins to feel like they are trapped in the mind of very old person, haunted with thoughts of the yesterdays they will never see again. Suffocatingly weird.