E-Mail This Article to a Friend Amusing muses The Fiery Furnaces turn to Grandma BY SIMON W. VOZICK-LEVINSON
	Related Links The Fiery Furnaces' official Web site Mike Miliard reviews The Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat.

It’s not unusual for a pair of siblings to create an outlandish fantasy world, but few are as open about their strange daydreams and inside jokes as Matt and Eleanor Friedberger, the NYC-based brother-and-sister team known as the Fiery Furnaces. Last year, Blueberry Boat (Rough Trade) tested listeners’ tolerance for wordy tales of fruit piracy and lost dogs, babbled over kitchen-sink electro-blues arrangements that often thudded, squelched, and chimed toward the 10-minute mark. All that cliché-smashing was surprisingly catchy, and the disc became an indie success story.

Still, even fans who have learned to expect the unexpected might be thrown for a loop by the Furnaces’ forthcoming third album. Rehearsing My Choir (Rough Trade, in stores October 25) is a collection of semi-fictionalized episodes from the life of the Friedbergers’ 83-year-old grandmother, Olga Sarantos. It brings this willfully obscure duo close to parody, but they don’t flinch, keeping mostly mum as their matriarch’s spoken reminiscences provide the lion’s share of vocals. "It’s really straightforward," Matt tells me over the phone as the band head to the first date of a tour that comes to the Museum of Fine Arts this Wednesday. "It’s the simplest music you can ever imagine, played very casually, and then there’s a woman sort of talking and a woman singing."

The rush of player-piano trills that opens the album, on "The Garfield El," is simple enough — no blunt-tipped synth shuffles here, not even a drumbeat. The only thing for the ear to focus on is Sarantos’s husky voice, commanding the clacking keys: "Faster, hammers, churn and turn into my late train to my lost love!" Her proud tone belongs to a generation that’s prehistoric by indie standards. "I think of her as a pyramid or some sort of monumental presence on the record," Matt says. "You don’t meet people like her on records too often these days."

As Sarantos’s cryptic declarations take center stage, supported by melodic turns from Eleanor, the instruments follow her every whim. "The music is supposed to illustrate the anecdotes," Matt explains. "It’s all supposed to be really close to hand, and threadbare." Every so often, there are pleasant reminders of Blueberry Boat’s treasure-trove of off-the-wall hooks — "The Wayfaring Granddaughter" begins with a suave harpsichord-and-hi-hat shimmy, and an electronic squeak dances nimbly over acoustic strumming on "Seven Silver Curses." But before any one track becomes too much like a singable song, it’s back to Grandma’s story hour.

"It’s still a rock record, I would argue," Matt says. He begins to rattle off a few less eccentric influences, but only one — "the parts of girl-group songs or Jan and Dean songs where they’re narrating what’s going to happen, then the motorcycle crashes" — bears resemblance to Sarantos’s trip down memory lane. "To try to have Eleanor and my grandmother on a record together, that’s the reason for it."

The Furnaces’ efforts to capture their grandmother’s personality have taken them outside most pop guidelines, but the affecting story line grounds their idiosyncrasies. Rehearsing My Choir mines rich veins of everyday poetry from Sarantos’s detailed soliloquies, though its more strained interludes can sound like a spoken-word slam at the local retirement home.

The Furnaces’ next album, Bitter Tea, already finished and slated for an early-2006 release, promises a return to relative normalcy — Matt mentions lovelorn singing and backwards tape loops. Of course, when I suggest that they’ve split their psych-pop instincts and their urge for sprawling narratives between the two discs they recorded in the last year, he won’t give the easy answer. "We’re not smart enough to have tendencies one way or the other. We just make whatever seems amusing at the time."

Fiery Furnaces + Man-Man | Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave, Boston | October 12 | 617.369.3306