Sleep Standing Up

The Fiery Furnaces @ North Six 1/5/2007
Nevers (instrumental intro) / In My Little Thatched Hut / I’m In No Mood (with Nevers instrumental interlude) / Black-Hearted Boy / Bitter Tea / Waiting To Know You / The Vietnamese Telephone Directory / Oh Sweet Woods / Borneo / Benton Harbor Blues (with Nevers instrumental tag) / Whistle Rhapsody / Teach Me Sweetheart / Bitter Tea (“Crazy Crane” part) / Name Game / Birdie Brain / South Is Only A Home / Quay Cur / Slavin’ Away / Single Again / Blueberry Boat // Japanese Slippers / Police Sweater Blood Vow

The Fiery Furnaces “Japanese Slippers (Live in session for Face Culture, 3/4/2006)” – I had been anxiously waiting to hear this version of the Fiery Furnaces for months. If you’re not aware, they’ve been playing since September in a line-up consisting of Eleanor Friedberger on vocals, Matt Friedberger on organ, Jason Loewenstein on guitar, Bob D’Amico on drums, and Michael Goodman on all manner of percussion. The majority of the set was comprised of a medley of Bitter Tea songs, running in roughly the same order as they are heard on the LP, but performed with drastically different arrangements. (I know, what a shock.) The show came with extremely variable results. The highs were exceptional (“Teach Me Sweetheart,” the second appearance of “Bitter Tea,” “Single Again,” the cheerful new tune “Japanese Slippers,” and the danceable sing along version of “Police Sweater Blood Vow”), and the lows were incredibly frustrating.

The band’s focus throughout the evening was placed almost entirely on rhythm, and so Eleanor followed suit by either mangling or completely abandoning her melodies in favor of staccato syllable blasts, in effect killing the appeal of more than half the setlist. In previous live incarnations, the band’s altered arrangements were exciting because they found new ways to present familiar melodies — no matter how dizzying the 2004 medley shows were, if you knew the records, you could sing along from start to finish. Increasingly, they are just shoe-horning their lyrics into new forms without any regard for anything other than maaaaybe meter. It’s a perverse thing because it seems to assume that the lyrics were always more important than the melodies, and though I do love their words, this approach is extremely out of touch with their strengths as musicians and performers, especially when Eleanor speeds through so many of her lines that they become an incomprehensible blur through much of the show. The band was playing consistently interesting music, and I would have much rather heard Eleanor spout new words that fit comfortably within that jagged syncopation rather than listen to her jam the lyrics of some of my favorite songs into those structures for no other reason than to say “hey, here’s an oldie.”

Unsurprisingly, the best parts of the show came when she actually sang the tunes as they were written, though those selections seemed arbitrary — “Teach Me Sweetheart” and “Police Sweater Blood Vow” are certainly songs with melodies that ought not to be screwed around with too much, but why don’t they feel the same way about “Inca Rag/Name Game,” “Birdie Brain,” and “South Is Only A Home”? The encore was easily the best part of the show, since those performances effortlessly blended the percussive elements with pre-existing melodies and song forms, allowing the rhythms to add to the songs rather than knock them out their orbits. I’d love to see the band play an entire show in the audience-friendly manner that they performed “Police Sweater Blood Vow,” but the Friedbergers seem so hell-bent on fucking with their audience that I can’t imagine them doing something so simple and wonderful for quite some time. (Click here to watch the entire Face Culture session.)