There’s never been a more appropriate time to start talking about The Fiery Furnaces again. While the band is still on hiatus, Eleanor Friedberger (one of the band’s two primary members), has released her third solo record in the past week, called New View.
With New View, Eleanor strives to free herself of the indie rock title that has followed her since her genre-defying work in The Fiery Furnaces. And in all honesty, the result is a record that’s sort of boring.
All of that brings me back to Widow City. After being disappointed by New View, it was easy to go back to The Fiery Furnaces. Although fans will forever argue about which Fiery Furnaces record is the best, I think a safe argument can be made that Widow City is their most rock-influenced. Distorted guitars are everywhere in the album, which was unusual for the band at that time.
Widow City is also the most Bowie-like of their records. It’s inventive in ways that I like to image Bowie would have loved, and since his recent passing, music that reminds me of Bowie has been in heavy rotation. Widow City is positively eclectic, jumping all over the place, unsure of the mask that The Fiery Furnaces wants to wear. And it’s wonderfully Bowie-like in its refusal to be stamped as a single, definable thing.
It’s also an incredibly intricate album. Almost every track starts mid-bar, making it impossible to listen to just a single track. You lose all sense of context. The album didn’t have to be laid out that way; each song does feel sonically different and texturally unique. It’s a very clear choice to separate the tracks that way, making it a unique statement in a time when the future of the album was unclear given the state of the single.
All of that adds up to an unusual album, even for The Fiery Furnaces. It’s the sort of music that I wish Eleanor and her brother Matthew were still releasing.