Look, let’s just get this out of the way: Fiery Furnaces’ third release is an EP in the way that Cut The Crap is a Clash album or Troll 2 is a sequel to 1986’s Troll — which is to say, it’s an EP in name only. At 41 minutes and three seconds, it’s longer than any studio album by the Replacements or Ramones. Even Wikipedia is skeptical of the disc’s self-designation, noting that, at such a length, it “is arguably not an EP, but rather a short LP.”
But in the wake of 2004’s Blueberry Boat — the brilliant, proggy-minded opus that preceded it by six months, polarizing critics and turning Fiery Furnaces into an unlikely mid-aughts buzz band — EP certainly felt like an EP. It’s a slim volume compared to that dense behemoth: 10 gloriously frazzled pop tunes, all of reasonable length, seemingly designed to woo listeners intrigued by the duo’s inventive songwriting but turned off by nine-minute songs with multiple movements. And, as gems like the sun-kissed call-and-response “Here Comes The Summer” and the seafaring ditty “Sing For Me” showed, the siblings Friedberger could tone down the weirdness and do quirky popcraft like the best of them.
What most casual listeners didn’t realize — since neither the marketing nor the packaging made it clear — was that EP was really more of a rarities compilation than a new release, its songs cobbled together from a handful of singles the band had released before and after Blueberry Boat. Some selections were B-sides from the “Crystal Clear” single (2003), others from the various versions of the “Single Again” single (2004), and still others from the “Tropical Ice-Land” vinyl 7″ (2004). That includes a thrilling, electrified version of “Tropical Ice-Land” itself, which first appeared, in gentler form, on 2003’s Gallowsbird’s Bark and which, in this rendition, with its trippy backmasking, foreshadowed 2006’s Bitter Tea.
The backstory goes like this: In lieu of releasing any proper singles from Blueberry Boat, the Fiery Furnaces decided to release “Single Again,” a more digestible non-album single (with B-side “Sing For Me”), in July 2004. It was only available in the UK (home of their label, Rough Trade), as were previous singles, so the duo decided to compile the assorted material onto EP, which arrived 20 years ago this Saturday, amid a period of feverish creativity for the Friedbergers. Given the acclaim garnered by Blueberry Boat, which lit up the blogosphere and received an eye-popping 9.6 score from Pitchfork (fully deserved, I’ll note), anticipation was high.
While Blueberry Boat is the sort of mind-altering masterpiece I need to be in the mood to surrender myself to, EP is a disc I can throw on and enjoy pretty much any day of the week. Still, if this is the Fiery Furnaces in normal mode, it’s pretty wacky by anyone else’s standards. The compilation kicks off with squelchy synths as Eleanor takes the lead on a zonked-out reimagining of the folk traditional “Single Again,” ornamented with clipped guitar loops and laser noises. (A far cry from Doc Watson’s take on the same tune.)
From there, we get some of the duo’s most indelible melodies in the form of “Here Comes The Summer” and “Evergreen” before “Tropical Ice-Land” goes full Elephant 6 psych freakout. “Smelling Cigarettes” showcases the band’s knack for condensing whimsical short stories into eccentric piano-pop jaunts, with Eleanor playing the part of an unemployed alcoholic beefing with a newly divorced neighbor. It’s got a delightfully threatening outro, too: “I’m gonna pack up your eyes with sand!”
“Cousin Chris” is exhilaratingly fun, with a woozy melodica(?) solo and verses overflowing with alliterative tongue-twisters (“Right raise rank rise rust; and how she ever fussed!”), while “Sweet Spots” is the closest these weirdo siblings ever got to power-pop. Such tracks highlight just how much joyous weirdness the Friedbergers could cram into the confines of a four-minute indie-pop tune. It’s a flex when your B-side material is this good.
Of these 10 songs, I believe only “Sullivan’s Social Slub” was entirely new, which makes sense. It feels like an outlier here, with its queasy beat loops, pitch-shifted vocals, and jarring transitions. After six-plus minutes, it closes out the EP with a snarling guitar solo and some jittery synth breakdowns. The track sounds like something that could’ve appeared on Blueberry Boat, though, as Matthew Friedberger clarified in a spring 2005 interview with a college paper, none of these songs were recorded during that album’s sessions. “We like all those recordings that are on EP, and none of them have come out in the US, though they came out in Britain as B-sides,” he explained. “So we put them out and [Rough Trade] said they’d do it for cheap.”
At the time of the interview, Fiery Furnaces planned to release two more albums in 2005: one already completed (Rehearsing my Choir, a bizarro collaboration with their grandma) and another in progress (the devilishly fun Bitter Tea). EP’s title was a way to signal that it was just a stopgap release. “[W]e didn’t want people to think that this is our new record,” Matthew said.
In retrospect, EP represents that brief, post-Blueberry Boat moment where Fiery Furnaces seemed poised to break through to the Big Indie level and maybe even convert some of their critical adoration to wider commercial success. Does that sound crazy? Maybe. But consider that this was the era when a glowing Pitchfork review could break a band seemingly overnight. Consider that, within a year, Arcade Fire, whose debut arrived two months after Blueberry Boat, went from playing bars and small clubs to sharing the stage with David Bowie at Central Park. Consider that Modest Mouse went from Up Records to Kidz Bop. Consider that, circa 2005, Blueberry Boat was in stock at my local suburban Borders.
Had the Fiery Furnaces continued along the path of EP — had they kept dialing up their pop smarts and pumping out iPod-era bangers like “Here Comes The Summer” — maybe they could’ve become festival headliners or whatever. They certainly seemed poised for something.
But, to their everlasting credit, Matthew and Eleanor were always true to their defiantly weird muse. Nine months later, they put Grandma Olga front and center on Rehearsing My Choir, torching much of the critical goodwill they’d earned and sealing their fate as a belovedly niche outfit.
And that’s OK. The Fiery Furnaces were probably always destined to remain a cult concern. They burned fast and bright. But during their wildly creative peak years of 2004-2006, their cult was eating good.
