[review 2007: favourites]

Like most people, I came to the Fiery Furnaces by way of Blueberry Boat, the duo’s breakthrough album from 2004. That album was both exhilarating and mindboggling, and not always in a good way. To this day I’m still not sure if I like the album or not. I still vividly remember the days I spent listening to the album during the sunny Vancouver summer I spent as a transient student getting used to a new city, so for that Blueberry Boat will always be a bit special. But I can’t say the same for the content, which remains easier to admire than love. Clearly something interesting was at work; I just couldn’t figure out what.

Last year’s Bitter Tea was a step in the right direction. For the first time, I actually recognized songs from previous listens. It still felt like an album that demanded a lot of your time and effort, but at least the payoff was more immediate; you could get to like songs like “Black-Hearted Boy” and “Borneo” pretty quickly, and “Police Sweater Blood Vow” was one of the best songs the Furnaces had recorded to date. Bitter Tea had its problems, sure—it was a bit sluggish at times, and in hindsight there’s an odd cloud hovering over the album (other than the one on the album’s cover), as though the enthusiasm of Blueberry Boat had been somehow suppressed and rerouted through an arsenal of studio electronics. On the one hand it meant Bitter Tea didn’t stagger from genre to hook to coda like a drunken sailor, but it also meant the album didn’t sound alive like its flawed predecessor did.

Amazingly, almost shockingly, the multi-year project to figure out the Fiery Furnaces has reached a new apex. Upon first listen, the epic seven-minute opener “The Philadelphia Grand Jury” returns to noodly schizo Blueberry Boat territory. Except it doesn’t; after the nervous guitar intro we shift gears to… a lazily gorgeous set of guitar chords? And then when Eleanor Friedberger finally arrives a minute and a half into Widow City, she sounds relaxed and easygoing. Imagine Blueberry Boat without the attention deficit disorder and you’re beginning to understand where Widow City’s headed. For some people this will inevitably be a disappointment; part of the Fiery Furnaces’ raison d’etre, after all, was that perpetual nervous twitch in their music. For me, it was the change that finally made the music lovable.

If anything, “The Philadelphia Grand Jury” is actually the weakest song of the opening twenty minutes, because what comes afterwards is utterly brilliant. “Police Sweater Blood Vow” hints at the direction of “Duplexes of the Dead,” which takes the live, immediate sound of the former and adds a more luscious backing track. But that’s just a prelude to “Automatic Husband,” a perfect balance of the Friedberger’s neurotic genreshifting tendencies and the rock pedigree you always knew was lurking in there somewhere but never really found full expression. Same goes for “Clear Signal From Cairo,” six minutes full of twists and turns (and noisy-as-fuck thrashing) but otherwise surprisingly direct and immediate for a Fiery Furnaces song.

The entire first half of the album up to and including “My Egyptian Grammar” is lovingly carved out of a solid chunk of awesome. Had the album stopped after the twenty-five minute mark, Widow City could possibly have been my favourite CD of the year. That it keeps going for another half-hour makes it more difficult for me to recommend the album without reservations, but to be honest the second half isn’t so bad either. It takes another three or four tracks for Widow City to start dissolving back into dissonance—for those of you keeping score, that gets us to the forty-minute point—that’s an entire album for most band. There are still flashes of brilliance (like “This establishment will now serve MY purposes!” in “Cabaret of the Seven Devils”), but they’re harder to make out amidst the more raucous, unfocused meandering of songs like “Wicker Whatnots.” By the time I get to the final title track, my attention span’s been shot to pieces—and while Widow City the album is great, “Widow City” the song is forgettable bordering on annoying.

Despite the flaws of the second half, Widow City leaves a very good impression. It’s the first Fiery Furnaces album I’ve put on just to listen to, not because I’d just bought it and should try it out, or because I felt the need to listen to it over and over again to “get it,” as though I were drinking cough syrup because it was good for me. More than that, it’s the first Fiery Furnaces album that fulfills the potential I saw in them when I first heard some of their songs: “Crystal Clear,” “Single Again,” “Straight Street” and “Evergreen.” A charmed set of songs to be sure, and finally an album that manages to do justice to all of those initial touchstones. For a while I had a hard time deciding if I could say an album where a significant number of tracks didn’t do that much for me was worth calling “the best of the year.” I think almost singlehandedly rehabilitating my opinion of a band is pretty good grounds, though, and no jury in the land would convict me. Well, maybe one…