Ease All Trouble Off My Mind

The Fiery Furnaces @ Webster Hall 6/29/2006
Rub Alcohol Blues / Chris Michaels / Crystal Clear / Straight Street / Police Sweater Blood Vow / My Dog Was Lost But Now He’s Found / Asthma Attack / Benton Harbor Blues / Quay Cur / The Garfield El / A Candy Maker’s Knife In My Handbag / Evergreen / Teach Me Sweetheart / I’m In No Mood / Black Hearted Boy / Leaky Tunnel – Tropical Iceland / Single Again / Blueberry Boat // Don’t Dance Her Down / Up In The North / Bitter Tea / Chief Inspector Blancheflower / Bow Wow / Rub Alcohol Blues

The Fiery Furnaces “Rub Alcohol Blues” – Check out that setlist! You would think that they were touring for Gallowsbird’s Bark! As much as I do love most everything that has followed, it’s sort of impossible for me to imagine the Friedbergers ever topping that first record in terms of sheer density of perfectly written songs or my own sentimental attachment. Unlike the last show that I saw them play at the Bowery Ballroom in April, the Furnaces wisely stuck to playing songs that worked well being played in a full-on classic rock band style, or reworked some selections into more effective arrangements. They had totally butchered “Teach Me Sweetheart” and “Bitter Tea” in April, but this time they took their time with the latter, and gave the former a spacey, art rock makeover that sounded like a melange of early 90s indie guitar textures. The band was tighter and more focused than I had ever seen them in this incarnation, and the Friedbergers both seemed to be in pretty high spirits over the course of the longest show that I’ve ever seen them play. “Don’t Dance Her Down” was a particular highlight for me, with Eleanor playing the song on guitar with Bob D’Amico and Jason Loewenstein more or less in exactly the same arrangement from the album until Matt returned to the stage and played the song out with a guitar solo. “Rub Alcohol Blues” began and ended the show in a radical new arrangement that broke at the end of each verse for Eleanor to shout “Tequila!”

I am happy to report that the band is taking baby steps toward production values — they came out to a pretty rad audio collage announcing that “the ceremony is about to begin” and that “The Fiery Furnaces are in the house!”, and as you may have noticed in my crappy camera phone photograph above, they had a specially made backdrop on the stage. As you can see in that image, there’s the bright “FF”, but what you probably can’t make out is that it is entirely made up of scrawled Furnaces lyrics in cyan, magenta, and yellow. (Click here to buy the best album of this decade to date from Insound.)

HEY! LOOK! WEEKEND EDIT!

NPR answered my prayers and provided the world with a high quality recording of this version of the Furnaces show. Here are three highlights from the 6/30 Washington DC show, which had a very similar setlist as this NYC set.

The Fiery Furnaces “Police Sweater Blood Vow (Live @ The 9:30 Club 6/30/06)”
The Fiery Furnaces “Bitter Tea (Live @ The 9:30 Club 6/30/06)”
The Fiery Furnaces “Teach Me Sweetheart (Live @ The 9:30 Club 6/30/06)”

(Click here to hear the rest of the show streaming on NPR’s site.)

Elsewhere: My review of the Strangers With Candy feature film is up on The Movie Binge.