Album Review: The Fiery Furnaces – Remember

By Travis Woods

Release Date: 8.19.08

Label: Thrill Jockey

M.C. Escher Gets His Ya-Yas Out! might have been a more appropriate title to this two-disc, forty-song live album that encapsulates three years of touring into two brutally twisting, shapeshifted hours of synapse-shattered art-pop. The live music picks up where the studio recordings left off, as the Furnaces push their sound into even more off-kilter rooms of sideways, aural-illusion deconstructions, a noise that is less garage and more meth lab as they whiplash throughout synth-addled rock to throat-torn punk to chiming pop.

Stitched together from countless live dates, Remember is intended to be a representative mosaic of an entire era rather than a singular, definitive concert, with the songs blurring and edited into one another to form a metal machine grind of music that, while certainly exhausting—there’s even a disclaimer: “Do not attempt to listen to all at once”—maintains a kind of lurid appeal in its dogged attempts to capture a three-year journey within the constraints of a double LP. Yes, it can be overwhelming, but so is staring at a TV one inch from the screen; stand back, though, and you can see a narrative emerge—the same can be said for Remember. Besides, it’s much better sounding than anything you’re watching on MTV2.

August 20, 2008 | Filed Under Album Reviews, Exclusive Features, New Videos 

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