The Fiery Furnaces "Rehearsing My Choir" (aka the Grandmother album)

what's the story (or can you tell)?

I haven't listened close enough to get the full story, but it's mostly the grandmother telling stories about her life and loves as a young woman, with Eleanor singing bits as Young Grandma.

Vaudeville and Sparks are definitely good references for this record.

(but i like the songs though!)

It's good to see that I'm not alone in focusing on the music before really paying close attention to the story. It's very overwhelming, and I'm most interested in what Matt's doing at the moment.

matt's become such a great pianist

(Digression: I hadn't even heard of the Sparks until a few days ago, and now I can't get away from 'em. I'm taking it as a sign. Which album should I get? I'm trying to decide b/w Kimono My House, which looks the coolest, and No. 1 in Heaven.)

http://graphikdesigns.free.fr/sparks-a-woofer-tweeters.html

"Once, there were two Kevins."
"You mean two jerks."

Considering this was what I liked most about Blueberry Boat (although, strangely, what I liked least about EP), I must say I'm really looking forward to this.

2 x-posts

"Rehearsing My Choir" is pretty certainly the strangest record that will be put out by any high-profile indie band this year. It's the truly avant-garde record that many critics mistook "Blueberry Boat" for last year. On the other hand, whether or not it's something that I'll want to listen to more than once or twice remains to be seen.

when weirdness is sold to you as the featured them the only thing you can reach out to to disturb you is...?

the record that I can get a hold of and a handle on and start to unpack or unfurl

but we can argue definitions of avant-garde left and right all day long

i dig this because it makes the story feel somewhere off to the left of "real"; it's like they're imparting a fable rather than trying to be authentic.

Well, it's the most directly narrative; you don't have to fight through melody to get to the story.

!!

By the by, I interviewed Matt FF this morning. He was exceedingly funny and charming. I think I buttered him up by comparing the record to Saul Bellow. It looks like they will have another new album out in January.

Oh yeah, I know. Oct 26 over here, I think. That's why I put "out" in quotes.

I think I buttered him up by comparing the record to Saul Bellow.

Haha, that was very generous of you. Some lines do approach a Bellovian pithiness. Like: "You could smell the boiled cabbage on those bullets."

Slavin' Away / Rehearsing My Choir

The Garfield El

the story about the bishop is very classic as well.

It's like when you're writing an album review - sometimes you have to squeeze everything into 150 wds and things become crystal-perfect but very compact, and other times there's no cap and you get to stretch your limbs and say all of what you need to say, you get to keep your indulgences (your "darlings"), and you can still make it work.

I like the Furnaces looser, I guess. And I think it's important that I like these stories so much more than those on the previous records. I LOVE "Or SO he thought..." and then the "chocolate so bitter that it could KILL TYPHUS", the way Eleanor sings "stitches", etc.

yes! that part is like children's theater, in the best possible way.

the other part i love a lot is when the archbishop enters the room for his meeting with olga and the bishop, and matt friedberger plays this hilarious VIDEO GAME BOGEYMAN DEATH METAL MUSIC OF DOOM on his synth.

YES that is such an awesome beat. i burst out laughing the first time, and then when i played it for him my flatmate did too.

But there's a lot of "how dare they" in why people don't give this a chance, which bugs me the most. If you see it from a prog perspective there's nothing outrageous about this album. Shit, people used to listen to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

some people still do!

A lot of people get hung up on grandma's voice, too. So to take it to prog again, they should start with some Robert Wyatt first and then give this album a try ...

same thing.

Then someone should tell that to everybody else. Remember when they came out and everybody compared them to the White Stripes? I think people are still stuck on that reference point - that they're an indie band gone horribly wrong. And I think a lot of the negative reviews came out that way because they take that perspective, especially when we talk about them as being "unlistenable."

But I think that Jody is correct in that the people moaning the loudest about Blueberry Boat and Rehearsing My Choir are the type of people who have a fairly limited background in rock music and cling to very conservative "indie" rock acts that do little to challenge their notion of what a rock album should be like.

this is way better than the blueberry boat. go greek or go home

This is possible. But you also might just be a devout partisan willing to indulge their artsy-farting more than those of us who like them fine when they're not quite so artsy-fartsy. And I have my own devout partisanships, I know what they're about, and I can totally see the FFs as a band that would inspire them. They just don't do it for me, and it's not cuz I don't like "difficult" music, I just don't get all that interested or excited by their "difficult" music. Rehearsing My Choir is interesting in a lot of ways, and it does certain things, but the certain things it does aren't things that I see myself needing a lot of. You know?

i'm willing to indulge it because i like their restlessness and risk-taking and i'm more interested in celebrating the little parts that succeed than considering whether or not the albums work as whole entities. they're a pretty willful band, and i know i'm not always going to love everything they put out, but their "we're running our career into the ground and alienating our fanbase and we'll keep doing it until we're forcibly removed from the plant" attitude is very attractive to me. it's ok... i'm not always brilliant either.

planet. is what i meant to say.

http://www.chicagoreader.com/pdf/051028/051028_ot_music.pdf

I know, me too. I just sometimes like the attitude more than the results. But I'll still listen to whatever comes next.

the FUrnaces are a long way (in my eyes) from being 'mythic' on a scale of Pavement or even The Shins/Red House Painters... i guess they're just too young a band...

I strongly believe that the Furnaces are one of the few bands of their generation who will have an enduring cult a la Pavement, The Fall, and Sonic Youth.

Seriously, fuck the Shins! I'm sure people said this kind of bullshit about Sonic Youth relative to mediocrities like the Replacements back in the 80s, but look who go the last laugh...

Police.

Sweater.

Blood.

Vow.

See, I've always thought they were terrible at selling themselves. Matt acts really underwhelmed or indifferent about his own work in every interview I've read.

Maybe this is part of a greater, secret plan but I get the impression that they're just doing what they want to do and haven't developed much of a strategy behind it. You may know something I don't but I don't think they have the skill to game the system like that - that's the same logic as thinking Bush nominated Miers to facilitate Alito. If the Furnaces were that shrewd, they could have positioned Rehearsing My Choir more effectively instead of letting it fall below even the new Liz Phair album on Metacritic.

the point of this comparison being -- The Fiery Furnaces need to become a whole lot more popular with people other than indie-rock nerds and critics. ANd Bitter Tea will have to be very different to break out of that scene. Their "mythic status" so far strikes me as something closer to Olivia Tremor Control, etc.

See, I've always thought they were terrible at selling themselves. Matt acts really underwhelmed or indifferent about his own work in every interview I've read.

OTM - and the same is true of the one chance i've had to see them live, in toronto.

hmm...probably not...Sonic Youth were "difficult" in the sense that they were discordant, but the brilliance of SY was making beauty out of discord...tranquility from chaos..FF doesn't, in my opinion, rise above technical proficiency...the Replacements were similar to SY, in forming ruckus into melody (obviously in a more traditional rock sense)..regardless, the 'mats are mediocre? I'm sure SY themselves were disagree with you

I actually prefer Rehearsing to Blueberry. I think the focus on one person's life and the inclusion of the grandmother's voice adds a lot of emotional heft. Also, I'm glad they largely jettisoned the traditional rock arrangements and went with the more musically-diverse synth-oriented stuff. The parts that sound like regular songs are nice, but I think what's even more interesting is the way that they lead into & out of other more narrative sections, the way the whole thing fits together.

Oh, I agree that the band has grandiose ambitions. But just not in a conventionally careerist way.

I'm sure it's a front, but it's not helping him sell records.

I think they'd be getting slagged even harder if they went with those other options you mentioned. Faux-modesty is probably their best choice, under the circumstances.

i know what you mean, matthew, but i think you're selling him a little short/being a little reductive. the modesty is to some extent an act, but i don't think it's entirely disingenuous - like a lot of artists, i think he has a constant tension between thinking he's a genius and thinking it's all bullshit. incidentally i also think it's this tension which makes me like the furnaces so much - the combination of grandiose ambition and undercutting self-doubt means they aim high as fuck but move on quickly because they're always afraid of getting too indulgent...

Maybe this is part of a greater, secret plan but I get the impression that they're just doing what they want to do and haven't developed much of a strategy behind it. You may know something I don't but I don't think they have the skill to game the system like that

well it's obviously not part of some gigantic masonic conspiracy, but the fact is that matt and eleanor had both rehearsing my choir and bitter tea finished months ago, right, and they made a conscious choice to release them in this order. i agree that they're floating from impulse to impulse rather than following some celestial scheme, but they'd have to be pretty naive not to see that critics would love the rehearsing-->bitter tea "return to form" story arc.

Wow, you do not know me even a little bit.

From what they say, they just want to release a lot of records, a lot of very different records, and they don't expect people to like them all. This record is a tough sell, but they've got another record in the can that's all short, catchy love songs, and they'll probably work that a lot harder if just because it's a path of lesser resistance.

I think it does a lot for their little mythology that they'll have difficult records that can be held up by the fanbase as being misunderstood and unfairly reviewed. When I look at how they progress, it's as though they've aced a master's class on music cult-building. They were wise to release an album like Blueberry Boat so early in their career, and they were also smart to put out something even more challenging before veering back to simpler songs.

I recognize that the very indie rock "small stakes" attitude they're taking toward Choir is annoying, but it would be even more annoying for them to declare it a work of genius. I don't think Matt was wrong to say that it would end up alienating people, and I think 99% of those people would have been alienated even if he had proclaimed it a work of brilliance that everyone will love. Because it's a half-spoken half-sung song suite about his grandmother's life.

Although the whole of disc C is given over to extracts from Bitter Music, for several reasons I haven’t included it in the above discussion of the "hobo" speech-music works. It’s a complicated business, requiring a whole booklet page of explanation. Basically, Partch had created a lengthy performance work out of his hobo journals, but for one or more of several reasons – ranging from matters of principle through artistic to personal - at first just kept it to himself, then later tried to destroy it altogether. Yet, even the finality of this act was indecisive: a microfilm copy of the entire text survived, along with some manuscript materials in his archive that he could have burnt, but didn’t. A huge question mark hangs over Bitter Music: did Partch want us to hear it, or not? According to Philip Blackburn, in a 1970 interview with Jean Cutler Partch made it clear that he did, saying that, "At that time I thought it didn’t represent me. Now, I’m sorry - it does represent me, or at least part of me." A case of "the follies of youth becoming the wisdom of old age", perhaps?

The abridged version in this Enclosure was put together by Warren Burt, who is also the vocalist in this recording. Vast tracts of Bitter Music are plain, straightforward recitation. At first, the piano – one of Partch’s possible reasons for withholding the work! – joins in only sporadically. As the piece progresses, the proportion of speech-music increases and, correspondingly, the voice gradually moves from objective detachment to subjective involvement, the whole thing culminating in what is described in the booklet - with considerable justification - as a "mad-song".

In the early stages, the discourse is sufficiently mundane for the listener to get bored and switch off. This would be a grave mistake. Almost imperceptibly, first your attention is captured then, inexorably, you are drawn into the world of those wandering in the Depression wilderness, until finally your mind becomes embroiled by the experiences and feelings expressed. It may not be quite what the old slogan of the News of the World boasted, "All human life is here", but this one small corner of human life is all there, its humour and hope, its bitterness and hopelessness. Here more than anywhere it’s significant that Partch considered his speech-music works to be "as much literary explorations as musical ones" because, even taken as a purely literary achievement, Bitter Music is extremely moving. However, the power of speech-music to amplify emotional expression is undeniable, because its progressive invasion renders Bitter Music nothing short of devastating.

- Paul Serotsky

Taken from this webpage:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2005/Sep05/Partch_Enclosure2_Innova401.htm

matthew: i think i get you now - your "mythic" had cultish valences (see: Six-String Samurai) whereas mine did not (see: Star Wars). but i'll withdraw cos mine is a boring conversation.

It confuses me when the Fiery Furnaces (and I have seen this in reviews) are referred to as "self-consciously hip", as there seems to be absolutely no correllation between their music and current trends in the hipster realm.

Not that any of this has anything to do with myth-making and whatnot, just my two cents on what makes the band interesting.

What an incredibly depressing way to think about music.

i hate to tell you this, pitchfork writer, but not all enjoyment is immediate (nor should it have to be). and "academic" is not a dirty word (nor should it have to be). if pitchfork writer doesn't like the record that's fine, but he doesn't need to turn his nose up at people who want to do a little brain-teasing and outside investigation to unlock what's not instantly gettable about the album.

I found it kind of refreshing m'self. And she's right, after all. It's not difficult to listen to music. Even a cucumber could do it - a cucumber with ears anyway.

To me this is complete bullshit because the proof's in the fucking pudding: I really like this record but I don't have ANY time for the "quasi-academic, cultural studies stance". I'm ambivalent about Blueberry Boat, never made it through Eppy's clearly very thoughtful breakdown, and think of it as an album I never had the patience to grok. Rehearsing seems way simpler to me - I've not really bothered listening to it front-to-back since the first couple times through... Instead individual tracks (or clusters of tracks) come up on shuffle, with their strange wee stories and radio-play sound-effects and I smile and laugh and dig it. You need to pay attention inasmuch as you need to hear the lyrics to really enjoy it, but "uninterrupted, dedicated listening"? In my experience, hogwash! And I don't say that as a big FF fan.

also i'm a wee bit durnk so please don't mind me.

i ended up loving blueberry boat after some initial ambivalence -- for me it was one of those records where SOMETHING compelled me to say "i'm not sure if i get it right now but by gum, i'm GOING to," and i kept coming back to it, even the really annoying parts, as if the enjoyment i got from the process of sorting through it was part of the whole entertainment package. i LIKE that it's so time-consuming. it might not be brilliant in the end, but the return on the effort-investment is definitely a good one.

"I am quietly judging you" is a Tom Cruise line from Magnolia, by the way.

PTA said something similar to Matt's line about "we're doing this record because this might be the only time in our career we have enough money to do it" line while he was promoting Magnolia.

i dunno, she's pretty otm about this. sure, most "folks" are hardworking and decent and that's all well and good, but they also tend to be very conventional, self-limiting thinkers who aren't very curious about things and generally need their hands held through any attempt at worldliness.

Also! Interestingly! I hear that this album is much-appreciated by at least a few people coming from a hardcore New Music / avant-garde perspective.

http://www.sequenza21.com/2005/10/granny-rehearses-choir.html

http://www.newmusicbox.org/chatter/chatter.nmbx?id=4405

The New Music thing is anecdotal! And mostly a joke, insofar as it only really refers to one person in the New Music "community." But he comes from a pretty hardcore New Music perspective and I understand he loves this album on those terms, which is interesting to me.

Petrusich claims "this is not to say that art should be easy or instant or utilitarian—but it should be penetrable, purposeful," but who can make an objective claim about what is penetrable or purposeful no matter what the trappings of the genre might ordain. In fact, Choir's exploration of the life of an octagenarian might make it the first indie rock album that isn't inpenetrable to people outside indie rock's genre-imposed generation gap.

I just don't get it - there are so many little pretty/catchy/exciting vocal and instrumental parts... enough that they get stuck in my head, and draw me back to listen, like any pop music does. I guess if you don't hear them, or if you just don't enjoy the bulk of the narration and other musical stuff (even though I think the pop moments can serve as "signposts" to guide you along), then I guess you just don't hear it.

Ironically, Petrusich herself was such a huge fan of The Fiery Furnaces's 2004 Blueberry Boat that it ranked Number Two on her best of the year list for the Village Voice. So why the complete volte face a year later?

Perhaps liking the earlier album so much deafened her to what The Fiery Furnaces's subsequent development turned out to be. Blueberry Boat is also filled with remarkable things and includes a fair amount of experimentation as well, but the unity that Rehearsing My Choir represents is a quantum leap forward. But appreciating that unity requires paying attention to detail and a willingness to listen carefully for the entire duration of the record. I don't mean to imply that Blueberry Boat is a quick fix, hardly, but it is somewhat easier. Whereas Rehearsing My Choir is something that can get completely lost if it's just playing in the background while you work on something else. It demands 100 percent commitment, something most folks in our society seem incapable of giving to anything these days.

xpost- I hear what you're saying about it being a broad swipe, but I can totally picture an octogenarian fan of new music (and these do exist) being able to get into Rehearsing, whereas something like Arcade Fire or Broken Social Scene might seem like typical adolescent angst-rock that doesn't say much to them.

It's pretty clear to me that Rob Mitchum should've been the guy to do the proper Pfork Rehearsing My Choir review, but hey, he ended up writing that really great feature about the reemergence of the story song cycle. But I get why Amanda Petrusich got the gig - her point of view and taste is much more similar to that of the average Pfork reader, and I get the feeling that there was a desire to not be a publication that would praise everything the band did. Even though I think that's pretty ridiculous when there's some really crappy acts that get consistently highly numbered reviews over there. (Sufjan Snoozins to thread!)

I would say it's not just the subject matter (though that's an important part of it) but also the formal qualities. ie., appreciation for rock music is still to some extent a generational thing. 80-somethings are just on the far side of the Elvis divide.

What's also interesting (if kinda obvious) is the fact that Frank's mostly arguing not with what the article says, but with the interpretation that's implied by the rating. He, unlike some on this thread, agrees with her about how the album works: "It demands 100 percent commitment, something most folks in our society seem incapable of giving to anything these days." He disagrees with the notion that this is a "problem" or a 4.0 issue. (And in doing so raises a whole other question, which is whether it's Amanda's job to agitate for her readers to do something Frank deems them "incapable" of.)

The problem here is one of those 800-word review problems, the same sort of thing we see with Liz Phair: all sorts of assumptions are made about whether she's dissing the album (a) because of a category error -- simply because it doesn't function as pop, or (b) because she feels it doesn't successfully offer other things, as well. There's a lot of assuming of (a) going on, even though there are clues floating all around those chewed-up quotes, clues concerning which aspects of the thing she liked just fine, and how they worked, and where they succeed in other frameworks -- it's too bad there's no summary to weigh that against the lost potential of "pop" and make explicit calls about why the balance doesn't suit her.

There's no fight there, just more category issues!

And that has to do with what I was getting at about the inevitable rock bands who branch out into some outlying terms -- terms their usual fans aren't necessarily confident in their ability to judge. And since indie fandom is huge on judging, you get all sorts of odd responses, from the people who are scared of getting conned (and therefore decide the band is just badly faking someone else's terms, out of pretension) to the ones who engage too happily (and actually do get "conned" by someone badly faking someone else's genre) to all sorts of related hand-wringing about who should or is allowed to do what. And that's why in cases like this I think indie and someone like Frank can have a great relationship all around, where we can look at these two takes and between them figure out a whole lot of interesting stuff.

Except, of course, for how the album actually functions overall, which doesn't get addressed in all this talk -- from both sides! -- about category issues.

(xpost yeah Nate I think we run across Wire-world as the intersection of "indie" terms and New Music ones)

(Equally lost is the very-interesting question of the Furnaces themselves and their relationship with these category issues: did they "intend" the record to work along a particular model, or for a particular constituency? Do they have particular backgrounds in either camp that they're responding to? Musicians too often pull vague "music is music" stuff to avoid answering questions like these, and it's difficult to tell when that's really their perspective and when they just don't want to give their brains up.)

(And equally lost is how exactly Frank likes this record. He has the ear and background to think of things in really rigorous structural and compositional terms; is he being excited by that stuff here, implying that the Furnaces really are working consciously in the forms of modern composition? Or is he interested in it more conceptually? How much is he reading them as "outsiders" to his own realm, and how much as insiders?)

xpost

But Nate that was my whole original point: surely Amanda's category issue here is not coming from the grandmother or any sort of age issue! (This is why I say the swipe is spot-on but messy and not very sharp here.) The category issue is coming from form, not content. And indie fans have traditionally been fine with old-people spoken-word interpolation on, say, Godspeed records. (And "indie"-context people have shared some small border with New Music sorts through labels like Tzadik, on which I can think of a few albums containing octogenarian viewpoints -- wasn't it Kramer who made that "Let me Tell You Something about Art" record, interviews with Jewish retirees about art? Kramer, of indie-guitar and indie-production fame?)

http://www.tinymixtapes.com/year2003/images/03.12.22_top_25_album_covers_of_2003-13alejandra.jpg

I kind of see what you're saying about this being a category issue, and we have the gatekeepers of these two rival categories sitting there taking pot-shots at each other across the divide. And there have been some quasi-indie albums featuring old people's voices, but not in a wholly sympathetic way. Those voices on Godspeed records usually come across as being somewhat deranged. And I'm not sure how seriously Kramar intends us to take those diatribes about the meaning of art (or whether things on Tzadik should be considered indie at all). However, since you mention Tzadik, I would suggest that people who like this record might also want to check out Shelley Hirsch's O Little Town of East New York (also on Tzadik).

xpost

However, I think Oteri's basic point still stands, which I would paraphrase this way: The very qualities that make a record accessible within one genre may make it somewhat exclusionary to people coming from a different genre, and vice versa.

The interesting part on those grounds is the start of the second paragraph:

If you can swallow Rehearsing My Choir as oral history = either (a) "I'm skeptical about allowing indie bands to aspire to something like that, cause they often try it without knowing what the hell they're doing, and none of us want to get conned or seem easily-led," or (b) I actually don't think it succeeds on that front, but I don't really have time to go into why

in the vein of NPR's National Story Project or Tom Russell's Kerouac-slurping poetry = "but no really, I understand the conceptual place this is coming from, in specific terms, and I know literature as well, and my problem here is going to be the result, not that I'm some indierock philistine with a closed mind"

(But in the end it's all "category" for both of them, and not engagement on that front -- maybe because music-oriented publications and their readers don't really make room or offer their writers credibility to come at things from those angles? We need more people in this -- a lit guy and a radio guy!)

I don't know what she could possibly mean by this. It sounds like she's doubting the veracity of the grandmother's remembrances - but that can't be right. It is patently an oral history - so I suppose the only issue could be whether it is true or not. But I don't think she's really concerned about the veracity of the history - she seems to have some more aesthetic criterion in mind, but I don't know what it is.

RIP

Olga Sarantos, nee Kokoris. Beloved wife of the late Dr. James W. Sarantos; loving mother of Joan Friedberger and Dr. William J. (Joanne) Sarantos; cherished grandmother of Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, Michael and Constance Sarantos; devoted daughter of the late Nicholas and Vasiliki Kokoris; dear sister of Peter (Elaine) Kokoris, Demetra (Tyki) Coston, and the late Katherine Kokoris; fond daughter-in-law of the late Vasilios and Ioanna Sarantopoulos; dear sister-in-law of the late Mary (the late Stelios) Polenas; devoted aunt of many. A singer, pianist, organist, harpist and choral director, Olga Sarantos began her musical career at the age of 12 as an organist at St. George Greek Orthodox Church, Rock Island, IL, and was choir director at Assumption Greek Orthodox Church, Chicago for over 40 years. Visitation Wednesday at Salerno's Galewood Chapels, 1857 N. Harlem Ave. from 4 to 9 p.m. Family and friends will meet Thursday morning at the Assumption Greek Orthodox Church, 601 S. Central Ave. Chicago, IL 60644, for visitation from 10 a.m. until time of funeral service at 10:30 a.m. Interment Elmwood Cemetery. Kindly omit flowers. Memorials to the Assumption Church appreciated. 773-889-1700

An appropriate ending, if that's what it is, for a great thread that led me to a great album about a train of thought while travelling to visit a family plot.(There is or was an "explanation," or aerial sketch of the album posted on Amazon, under Production Description. Oral history as um edited by the Furnaces, is the gist of the description, which seems to ahve been written by one or more Furnaces, and the story about the granddaughter who was seeing the two guys is about *another* granddaughter of *another* grandmother, umkay?) One of my favorite albums ever, and it didn't take me long to get into it (and I'm not particularly familiar with a lot of New Music)(I did and do find it goes well with Brian Wilson Presents Smile, and I also like Beefheart a lot, although I don't think Olga sounds like him, as the Spin reviewer said.) I'll also check the albums mentioned above, Alejandra & Aeron's Bousha Blue Blazes, and Shelley Hirsch's O Little Town Of East New York. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Olga, thanks, kids.

(Oh yeah, and as far as geezer mystique for indies, Olga was long preceeded by for instance Sun Ra, Moondog ("The world's oldest-looking fifty-year-old man," he was called, and they hadn't seen Jerry Garcia hit the Five-Oh yet) and Michael Hurley and Bob Dylan still drive their Model Ts through Clubland, and we'll see a whole lot more of that as Boomers continue to age massive. Olga is Beatles for the Age of Age, she loves you yeah yeah yeah)

RIP! now i will have to finally buy this album.