The Fiery Furnaces - Widow City (2007)

Review by Stephanie Maker

Purchase CD:  

I like to espouse that I like Queens of the Stone Age more than I like most people. It’s a fact and I’ll continue to tell this to people. Now however, I have to add The Fiery Furnaces to my antisocial little snipe.

I am absolutely in love with "Widow City". The music is esoteric and inspired. There are sounds in there that only a few enlightened individuals could put together and make them sound bearable let alone use them to construct a pleasurable aural experience.

I hate to use the popular vernacular but "Widow City" is so random.

You’ll be listening along, barely collecting the lyrics, until you snare something like “dead jelly fish lying on the beach”.

The confusion served not to drive me away from the tracks and pass them off as drivel, but to become even more immersed in making sense of the lyrics. In fact, I loved it lyrically. The words, coupled with sounds that soar through the air going into strange twist and turns (I’m thinking of the dogfight scene in Top Gun – forgive me) but they make for an astounding impact.

There’s definitely an absurdist feel to "Widow City". It harks back to Ionesco, or at least it seems to in my mind (look him up on the wiki, he’s a dude!).

I think I need a medal, however, for reading through the P.R. guff that tried to tell me that the lyrics were written via a ouija board. First paragraph in and I thought I’d gone wrong in the mind.

However, it did get it right when it said “there are few things in life as exhilarating as a new album by The Fiery Furnaces.” With that notion, I most certainly agree.

"Widow City" isn’t a far cry from that Tropical Iceland song that they made and had flogged on the radio. Well, Triple J played it a lot, much to my delight. It’s similar to that, but there’s more of it and its better.

Yeah, good album I’ve got here.

ALBUM RATING: 3.5 out of 5

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