The Fiery Furnaces - Blueberry Boat (Sanctuary Records)

Fiery Furnaces - Blueberry Boat
4 out of 5 Stars

When the Fiery Furnaces released their debut record Gallowbird's Bark last September, everything seemed pretty straightforward. The brother/sister duo of Matt and Eleanor Fiedberger dropped a solid record of mostly blues-based rockers. Slightly "quirky" and "off-center," yes, but not really much to puzzle over.

Apparently the joke was on the listening public at large. Even as they embarked on tour with Ted Leo, the Fiery Furnaces already had what would become Blueberry Boat in the can. Far from being a record of simple rock and roll songs with loose thematic connections, Blueberry Boat makes explicit what Gallowbird's Bark only hinted at.

Much of the co-written songs on the first record sounded like a travelogue about globetrotting and road tripping, each account hinging on clever word play. The fragmentation of ideas that accompanies word play came off as a simple by-product and incidental in the face of songs that didn't force the listener to pay too much attention to any one thing in any one song.

Rather than smoothing over the rough edges, bringing those thematic and narrative loose ends together and generally "tightening up," the siblings Frieberger seem to have used the meandering path of their lyrics to guide song structure and composition.

The result is a sprawling, sometimes difficult, schizophrenic joyride. From the first notes of Blueberry Boat it is obvious that something has changed. A synthesizer drones as various programmed errata drift in and out of focus. A percussive analog synth sound climbs up chromatically and instantly the change is made explicit. This tonal climb is almost identical to the ascent at the very beginning of Gallowbird's Bark, though on that record the line is played by a vibraphone or marimba.

Blueberry Boat takes the themes, both lyrical and musical, of Gallowbird's Bark and digitizes them, tears them apart, glues them back together and stretches them.

The lyrics themselves have a structural complexity that makes them seem almost poetic. On the first track, the 10-minute-long "Quay Cur," what begins as a narrative ("We hid beneath the barrels of blubber hoping that the rain had passed/But when the wind kept up the rats cut down the rigging off the mast") either evolves or disintegrates (depending on your taste) into an increasingly surreal litany of impressions ("Half hour sandglass/Seven saker round shot/Ice for the moonshine").

And the music mirrors the movement of the lyrics. Washes and stabs of sound eventually coalesce into driving shuffle rhythms as the words reassemble into a near-coherent story. Matt Friedberger's guitar work is coming into its own as yet another voice in the band. His solo lines stumble and clutter. They get tangled and stuck on each other only to stagger forward and repeat the process again. The insistence of his playing runs counterpoint to the obsessively repeating rhythms and cadences of Eleanor's vocals.

The complexity of Blueberry Boat is sometimes difficult to deal with. The Fiery Furnaces have so much to tell, so many scenes and stories to portray that it often seems as if they don't know what to say first. And so it all comes out at once. Digressing from sea to sea and story to story, Blueberry Boat carves a crooked path too circuitous for most to follow. It's a miracle they ever make it to the last song.