I'm Going Away / The Fiery Furnaces

With the release of I’m Going Away the Friedbergers seem set to mollify everyone who has been clamoring for them to stop with the cacophony and chaos and just settle down to play some straightforward pop music.

These people will still probably hate it.

Because the thing that makes The Fiery Furnaces music willful, pretentious and difficult is not the composition or instrumentation of their songs - it's that Matt and Eleanor Friedberger are willful, pretentious and difficult. And it is precisely those qualities that so enrage their detractors and endear them to their supporters. Nobody else makes music like they do, which the stripped down I'm Going Away makes abundantly clear since next to no one could change their modus operandi so radically and still sound so much the same.

First, let’s dispense with some timely retcon that’s been making the rounds: Gallowsbird’s Bark is not their best record. After their long sojourn into the musical wilderness (album length oral-historical familial fictions, two hour single song live records and more mini-suites that Pete Townshend can shake a stick at) Gallowsbird’s Bark may seem attractive in it’s simplicity but ultimately that is red herring. The Fiery Furnaces have grown so much since their debut that it seems more like an inspired sketch than an accomplished piece of work.

Not that I’m Going Away has much in common with Gallowsbird’s Bark anyway. The holistic nature of the record, exemplified by the live sound and limited palette, is in direct contradiction to that record’s cut and paste studio compositions. In fact, I’m Going Away resembles nothing so much as some of their longer song suites stretched out to album length.

On previous tracks like “Quay Cur”, "Chief Inspector Blancheflower" and “The Philadelphia Grand Jury” the Furnaces seemed to pack in a half dozen different songs into their run time and the tracks on I’m Going Away feel like those slices stretched to the shape of a song. The line between a piece of a larger composition repeated at length and a fully formed smaller composition may be small but it is distinct. And though these songs all have clearly demarcated beginnings and endings it doesn’t make them any less dissimilar than their musical counterpoints from previous albums - or any less a part of this one.

Tracks like "I'm Going Away", "Drive to Dallas”, “Cut the Cake” and “Keep Me in the Dark” all rely heavily on repetition and simplicity to make their mark. This replication extends to lyrics that are heavy with reiteration and alliteration (another Friedberger trademark), but also to the vocal melodies which more often than not mimic the primary instrumental melody. These elements combined with the unified production give the record the type of consistency that has never been present in their work before. This is an experimentation with a new type of epic song writing - rather than composing longer songs with multiple parts, each song is an entity unto itself but also part of a larger monochromatic whole. The lyrics here too seem to bear this out with their repeated references to catastrophic heartache, unexplained departings and final resolutions - not to mention that several songs that explicitly reference each other in the lyrics and melodies ("Charmagne Champagne", "Cups & Punches"). The outlier seems to be "Take Me Round Again" which is the closest to an honest to God pop song as they've ever come, but good as it is, it seems to be riff on (or rewrite of) Dylan's "You Ain't Going Nowhere" more than anything else.

So despite all the talk about The Fiery Furances "getting back to form" (whatever that means) or detouring to write pop songs, I’m Going Away is in actuality an evolution of their sound rather than a withdrawl to a less complicated one. It is more immediately accessible than anything they've release previously but that does not detract from the depth of creativity on display.