Hopefully one day in the near future the brother and sister team of Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger will stumble upon a magical bottle of focus juice and create the masterpiece album buried deep within Matthew's twisted, schizophrenic mind. Until then, the duo will continue to release uneven, self-indulgent, chaotic messes such as their sixth full-length album, Widow City.
Although the album has snippets of blissful progressive pop, for the most part Widow City is a muddling, sprawling album weighed down by too many instruments in the kitchen. While the songs can be excitingly disjointed medleys, Widow City contains too many unpredictable cuts within the songs, producing a scattershot of noises.
Even more maddening is The Fiery Furnaces - Eleanor on vocals, Matthew on Chamberlin, Mellotron and other keyboards, Jason Loewenstein on bass and Robert D'Amico on drums - come awfully close to creating a coherent, taut tour de force with Widow City but fall short, offering up instead a wounded work of staggeringly erratic tunes, an album too fractured, too playful, too jumbled.
Apparently Matthew Friedberger cut and pasted fragments of words and phrases from old advertisements in creating some of the lyrical content for Widow City. It makes sense, as the lyrics are torn snapshots from an unseen dimension, nonsensical words and phrases thrown into the potpourri that only magnify the illogicality of the album.
Widow City is a collection of 16 tunes - a handful of them flawless genius but mostly inflated, pompous dregs - that is pretentious art rock with barely a hint of art but a ton of pretentiousness.
Good: Cut down to a handful of songs, Widow City is an exciting, charged ball of kinetic energy, unsure and topsy-turvy but gloriously original. Stripped down and concentrated, the songs of Widow City - including the tribal beats and swirling Chamberlin of "Duplexes of the Dead" - create a noticeable tension, that when released burn bright and brilliant. "Ex-Guru" is funky and joyous prog pop that adds strings for a romantic touch with lyrical content that actually delivers a storyline: "She means nothing to me now/I tell myself every single day/I'm quite convinced I escaped her sway."
"My Egyptian Grammar" displays a deep drum beat blended with a dreamy, majestic string arrangement that allows Eleanor to sound perfectly lovely delivering a tale of a dried-up youth: "Your youth is lost and doesn't it now, seem/You can't make smoke, only steam."
"Right by Conquest" is raucous but boisterous, using rumbling drums, and weird and wonderful Mellotron noises, to create a wave of sound the tune rides. Even with a bridge featuring a freaked-out guitar break, the song is never pulled under by a clamoring undertow.
Bad: Even when the songs gain some focus, the lyrics need a Rosetta Stone for their deciphering. The droning bass line and funky beats of the otherwise excellent "Navy Nurse" are undone by lyrics including such gibberish as "Save a glacier name for my daughter/For when the snow turns red when the train pulls away/Listen to them whisper/She's alert, she's open-minded, she's involved" (repeat ad nauseam).
Insightful, vivid lyrics are intended to be stimulating, not bewildering. On Widow City, the lyrics create even more confusion, remaining too obscure and mind scrambling to generate an enjoyable narrative.
Eleanor also attempts to cram too many syllables into verses and choruses, delivering a rat-tat-tat of utter nonsense over the cacophony of clashing musical instruments.
Must haves: "Duplexes of the Dead," "Ex-Guru," "My Egyptian Grammar," "Navy Nurse," "Right by Conquest," "Pricked in the Heart"
Rating (out of five): 2 1/2