By Ben Grad
Noted experimental rockers The Fiery Furnaces played the
Variety Playhouse last week with the most basic of basic set-ups: drums and
bass, while Mathew Friedberger lead with guitar and Eleanor Friedberger covered
most of the vocal duties. Keyboard and organ were noticeably absent on
stage; and considering how much I'm Going
Away relies on the two, it left an unusual gap in the expected Fiery
Furnaces sound. Still, it was interesting to realize just how much the Fiery
Furnaces sounded like themselves, even without their signature instruments.
Earlier Fiery Furnaces shows have tended towards hour-long jam sessions,
blending songs from throughout the band's previous albums into a single whole.
As the band's catalog has grown, they've moved away from that structure,
instead playing shows (like their last two Atlanta concerts) that take care to
differentiate between tracks and stick almost entirely to songs from their most
recent albums. With I'm Going Away,
the format presents a bit of a problem – so many of the tracks from the album
sound so similar to each other that they tended to blur together when played
live. This problem is exaggerated by the
substitution of guitar for keyboard; guitar chords blend together, while
keyboard notes are self-contained.
lot of attentiveness (attentiveness I probably don't possess) to really pry the
nuances of difference between structurally similar songs. That might be a
turn-off to many concert-goers, but Thursday's crowd remained enthusiastic
throughout the show. The Fiery Furnaces
took the stage for two well-received encores, and the audience left, exhausted
and satisfied.
