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Myths and local legends
Twisted tales from Fiery Furnaces, White Magic, and Night Rally
BY MIKE MILIARD

After mythologist Joseph Campbell finished his guidebook to James Joyce’s protean, pun-drunk dreamscape Finnegans Wake, in 1944, he reported that he’d had to take frequent breaks from the book. After immersing himself for days at a time in the ebbs and flows of the Wake’s shifting meanings and made-up words, everything Campbell heard in the real world started to sound like Joyce’s garbled, multi-lingual jabberwocky. After countless listens to Blueberry Boat (Rough Trade), the sophomore record from the Fiery Furnaces (who play the Paradise this Friday), I’ve been experiencing a similar phenomenon. I’ll be going about my day when suddenly my temporal lobe will be flooded with a strangely shimmering synthesizer flourish or a lyric like "a looby, a lordant, a lagerhead, lozel, a lungio, lathback made me a proposal . . . "

As is the case with Finnegans Wake, looking to glean meaning from some of the more obscure corners of Blueberry Boat may be a fool’s errand. But that doesn’t mean it’s not an exhilarating challenge. (The CD has been out only since July, but a cottage industry of speculative exegesis has already sprung up.) The band’s songwriting siblings, Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, have conceived an undulating soundscape of 13 tracks. Five come close to or exceed the eight-minute mark. These are warped prog-rock explorations whose allusive, alliterative word games are as involute as the dense, difficult melodies. We meet a feisty captain who defends her sweet freight with her life and a man whose poor grades quashed his dream of being a typewriter repairman. We go to a Super K, a DQ, and a TCBY.

Blueberry Boat’s epic opener, "Quay Cur," portends the weird and wild ride that’s to come. It begins on a wharf, as electronics squeak and squawk like circling gulls and Eleanor adopts the voice of an urchin girl working below deck on a docked ship while pining for a lost locket, an amulet snatched from her and tossed into the sea. "And now I’ll never, never, never feel like I am safe again." In short order, a broken anchor chain sends the ship seaward. The boat, it turns out, has been hijacked by Dyaks, who sell Eleanor into slavery. She comes down with the croup, escapes, and heads north toward the Arctic Circle. As she does, she sings a dreamy incantation in Inuit. Yes, Inuit.

All along, the music changes, shifting with the twists of the tale. Over the course of more than 10 and a half minutes, it wends its way through at least six semi-distinct movements. From impressionist electronic tinkering to pianos meandering to circus calliope to roistering blues riffs to gentle acoustic-guitar arpeggios accented with sleigh bells, wah-wah pedaling, and tom-tom rumbling.

By the next song, "Straight Street," we’re back, it would seem, in the real world — but still it’s surreal. Matt’s guitar may sound subaquatic, but the lyrics place the narrator in the desert, at a Damascus Internet café. Eleanor, singing as herself, relates the travails of trying to sell cell phones to truculent Middle Easterners. And then, on the title track, the setting is a pontoon boat puttering past Taipei. Eleanor now is a steely old salt delivering blueberries from Grand Rapids to Hong Kong. Pirates beset her ship, but she protects the indigo cargo at the expense of her life. In the absence of lyrics, the manic piano, which ranges from jazzy ragtime to tidy classical chordings, narrates a wordless fight, as if in a silent movie, before synthesized strings sing a sad end as she sinks to the seabed.

Matt Friedberger, who wrote the lion’s share of the album, has said he was influenced by the Who’s first mini rock operas, works like "Rael" and "A Quick One While He’s Away." "Chris Michaels," with its crashing Keith Moon fills and propulsive strumming, attests to that influence. And the surreal globetrotting continues, through Aden, the Red Sea, Madras, Colombia, with a cast of gossipy characters engaging in arguments and infidelities. What does it all mean? Are the Friedbergers using fabulist flights of fancy to articulate a critique of globalization, suburban ennui, or mass consumerism? Or have they simply fallen prey to the allure of alliteration and got trapped beneath a toppled bookshelf of thesauruses and rhyming dictionaries? Does this oddball odyssey, beset on all sides by the ghosts of rock operas past, free jazz and Zappa spazz, weird funk and post-punk, blues and blooze, represent some new apotheosis of the post-post-modern ideal? Maybe it’s enough that music this unusual simply exists. In Blueberry Boat’s lysergic coda, "Wolf Notes," Eleanor says it simply: "Pick up your trumpet, your plastic pretend trumpet . . . Plug in your keyboard, your symphonic sound samba Samsung . . . Turn off your radio, shut away your stereo . . . and play me a tune today."

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Issue Date: September 10 - 16, 2004
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