Label: Sanctuary Records
Released: Jul 13, 2004 |
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Blueberry Boat is easily one of the most divisive albums of the year, mired by its own boldness, with a small army of interesting ideas and songs left for dead, drowned in the work's overall incoherence.
Siblings Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger made their musical debut with 2003's Gallowsbird's Bark, and a fine debut it was, combining stripped-down garage rock, stomping piano, broken keyboards, hyper bass lines, interesting lyrical imagery, and enough wordplay to match the album’s overall playfulness, all bundled up nicely in short, thick, solid songs. The album, despite a few missteps, was like aural recess. Though the album garnered some attention, the band was caught up by lazy comparisons and swept under Jack White’s loveseat while he was tongue-kissing Renee Zellweger.
The band’s inspiration for Blueberry Boat came mostly from The Who and their epic-length sloppy song suites like “A Quick One, While He’s Away”, along with what sounds like far more studio time and better equipment, and the results are an at times interesting and at times annoying mess, and a bold but broken follow-up for a young band with a weak grasp on the world’s attention.
The critical reaction to the album has been all over the place, from claims that the album is awful, which it is not in the least, to claims that it is album of the year, by those who praise incoherence, valuing most the works that they understand the least. The description that seems to fit the album best, however, is frustrating. Most of the songs near the 10 minute length, and throughout that time fly in a number of unrelated directions, with nothing to really hold them together except very loose, often fractured, at times downright silly, banal or pretentious narratives. So, just as you are really enjoying one part of a song, it morphs into something completely different, and often much more annoying. Eleanor still handles most of the vocals, though she passes the mic to brother Matt more on this album, with painful results, and while Eleanor wrote most of the songs for the superior Gallowsbird’s Bark, Matt wrote the majority of this album, which may explain the difference in lyrical quality. Blueberry Boat does sound much better than its predecessor, and there are small fragments of brilliance hidden throughout, but it is not enough to make the whole album worthwhile. The elaborate, fractured nature of the album was a fine idea, and the album seems impressive on first listen for the mere confusion is causes, but what seems like dense material turns out to be inflated and empty.
In the end though, the Fiery Furnaces still have my attention, even more so now despite the many flaws, flatulence, and failed experimentation that Blueberry Boat holds. That they are daring enough to try to stretch so far beyond their limits, that they knew how to have fun with a follow-up that probably would have been disappointing no matter what they did, that they can at once excite and piss off as many music fans as they have, is as commendable as Blueberry Boat is confounding and ultimately insubstantial.
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