The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

The Fiery Furnaces live for music. Sat in a traditional Shepherd’s Bush boozer with the band, I almost feel as though the two Friedberger siblings long ago entered into some solemn childhood pact to remain locked into their secret, fantastical kingdom of song to the near-absolute exclusion of anything else. Eleanor, a positively possessed presence onstage, is quiet and demure, letting big brother Matthew do most of the talking. But he’s softly spoken almost to the point of inaudibility, his greying Byrds-cut belying an almost childlike fascination with interlocking systems of information, random facts, stratagems of behaviour and, above all, music. Widow City is the sixth Fiery Furnaces album in four years, a period in which Matthew’s also found time to release two solo albums. Yet neither of them considers this to be unreasonably prolific.

“Because we haven’t had big success, we get to make more records,” Matthew shrugs. “Because there isn’t the same pressure…”

“…to be touring the same record for two-and-a-half years,” Eleanor says.

Oh yeah, they finish each other’s sentences as well.

“We were just talking about this yesterday, like are we gonna make another record?” continues Eleanor. “And we have to kinda wait and see.”

“I said, we have to make a record in the winter,” Matthew insists, “and then if this record does well, we don’t have to put it out in the summer. But if it doesn’t do well, then we have to put it out in summer, before people decide that they finally don’t wanna hear any more from us. Keep going before they forget they don’t like you anymore.”

But does that come naturally to you, working at that pace?

“Oh yeah, we’d work faster, wouldn’t we?” Matthew says. “Keep working as opposed to… not doing.”

“What else are we gonna do?” Eleanor laughs.

So you don’t have dry patches where you’re just not inspired?

“Oh, I’m sure we’ve had patches where it wasn’t as much fun,” Matthew concedes, “but because of that it would make you actually work. If you get nervous about it not going well you actually work harder, I guess. It’s fun to play rock music - physically fun, and that gives you a lot of positive feedback on its own: you don’t need to wait around for inspiration. Just playing, trying to play, trying to learn a song, gives you material.”

Do you come up with stuff by actually playing and experimenting with sounds and ideas and just seeing what works, or do you sit there on your own writing a song?

“Really, it comes from doing it,” Matthew says. “You have to do something that might kind of solve a problem - that lets you do something now, and do something next, and then you decide how you want that to be. Then, based on that notion you have, you do something, and whether or not it turns out that way you don’t know until you actually go and record. On this record I thought it would be fun if I tried to ventriloquise myself. To do, not real automatic writing, but logically pretend to do that. Eleanor would make scripts of stuff from the back of old magazines - especially ads - and then I’d have the scripts and turn it into a song.”

“The idea was that I was gonna give Matt a story,” Eleanor says, “and then he would…”

“…then I would actually write that,” adds Matthew. “It’s fun to have little scenarios in the process; to have some new thing for each record and think how you’re gonna come up with the material. You’re a singer-songwriter, you’re a band, whatever - it’s all the same. It’s fun to have each record be the result of a different game, you know?”

The key to Widow City is its use of a vintage Chamberlin synthesiser, which triggers faded analogue tape loops of string and woodwind sounds that permeate and inform the whole album. They create an eerie sense of dislocation; an obviously mediated and blatantly distorted sound-memory of an actual moment long since gone that conjures up both the lost eras of late sixties, early seventies art rock (Sparks, Brian Eno) and a more general aura of separation and transience, which are then reflected in the ambiguous narratives of the songs themselves.

“To begin with it was meant to be an early seventies record,” Matthew nods. “I mean, it’s supposed to sound like somebody’s obviously just listened to Houses of the Holy and Here Come the Warm Jets. And maybe heard a Van Morrison song somewhere.”

Do you still conceive of the album as a piece of vinyl, like those records were?

“Oh yeah,” Matthew says. “You think in terms of sides, 13-21 minute bits… that’s best. I always think of that.”

I just got the CD, and I found it hard to sit through it in one sitting. It’s quite exhausting.

“Yeah, but why would you do that?” Matthew asks. “I would never do that. You sit through sides. And then you get up. And maybe you don’t put on the second side straight away. It doesn’t mean I don’t like the second side. But it’s interesting now - if you don’t want to listen to the 29th minute of the CD it’s like, ‘I couldn’t get through that whole boring record!’ It’s interesting, but that’s the way it is. That’s a legitimate thing; that’s the way that technology changes the context.

“Widow City is a double album, so it’s four sides, four songs each. It’s very evenly split. They’re all 15 minutes long. But, as a CD, I don’t think it makes much sense. I’d understand if people don’t get it in one listen. You can do other things while it’s on, because it’s enough to hear it, if you listen to it loud. If you’re just sat there, looking at the sleeve, you wouldn’t wanna… anything would be too long. I wouldn’t want to do that at all.”

So is the CD edition going to have a note, saying this is the end of the first side, take a break, have a cup of tea…

“When they’re downloading it, they need to take a break after song four,” Eleanor suggests.

“Yeah, that’s a good point,” Matthew says. “We didn’t do that. We should have said something about it; we should put it in the lyrics or something… in the flap.”

Allow us: Widow City by The Fiery Furnaces is a wonderful, strange and intoxicating brew of a record. It has a very strong, rich flavour that is best sampled in several sessions. Otherwise you may feel rather overpowered. And you have to save your strength.