The Fiery Furnaces
Crystal Clear
(Rough Trade)
The Fiery Furnaces can’t make their mind up what they want to be – 60s Beatlesy psychedelia, 90s indie, or a musical – and it shows. They’re obviously firm believers that they’re being really experimental but it just sounds like everything’s tacked together with musical blu tack. ‘Crystal Clear’ starts off all psychedelic with stupidly mundane lyrics and I really start to despair until this great riff kicks in saving the song.
They also like to describe their music as a ‘twisted bluesy gem’ butthe first of the b-sides puts paid to any ideas of that. The song, entitled CousinChris, sounds like a reject from a musical (Oliver! springs to mind) and as asong in it’s own rights it just doesn’t work. The last track SmellingCigarettes is a cross between the Streets and Velvet Underground whilst managingto be nowhere near as good as either trying to give it an urban feel to it, recordedin one or two takes complete with background city noises. It doesn’t alwayswork and I really don’t recommend this single.
