Fiery Furnaces Call Radiohead 'Bogus'
- Posted on Nov 3rd 2009 4:00PM by Ken Micallef
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When the Fiery Furnaces -- the sibling duo of Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger -- recorded 'I'm Going Away,' they adjusted their usual penchant for mad rhythms, inscrutable vocals and dizzily complex arrangements to create an album Matthew calls "more casual than our past records." "The records in the past were made up of simple rock songs," he tells Spinner. "But the simple songs on 'I'm Going Away' are kept within the most obvious genre confines. Hopefully, for people who know the band, that's different and amusing. For people who don't know the band, they can relate to it how they would any song. In the future we will have our simple rock songs be less simply disposed of, but for this record we wanted the songs to be as casually arranged as possible. Well, maybe, almost."
An operatically-inclined and classically-trained pianist who enjoys such '70s rock icons as Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman as well as Richard Wagner, Matthew is well-versed in rock history. "Our model is album rock of the early '70s," he explains. "We like bubblegum and the singles of the '70s and '50s and '60s. We think of that period when pop musicians still felt the need to change and develop and it had to be good, though nobody knew what good meant. People were free then to be pseudo-intellectual about rock records and we agree with that mentality. But by the late '70s and mid '80s, bands were beginning to do the same old thing, so that commercial model is outdated. That doesn't mean that we feel obligated to change for commercial purposes. We think albums have to be different, otherwise you're a sellout and a fraud and you should hang it up. If you're concerned about selling T-shirts, you're a fraud. 'You're cheating the kids,' as Pete Townshend would say."
When told that Radiohead's Thom Yorke sent out a mass e-mail describing the group's tribute song to the UK's last veteran of World War I, 'Harry Patch (In Memory Of),' Friedberger adds the British rock star to his fraud alert list. "'Oh, please listen to our new song about Harry Patch,'" Friedberger says mockingly. "F--- you! You brand yourself by brazenly and arbitrarily associating yourself with things that you know people consider cool. That is bogus. That's a put-on. That's a branding technique and Radiohead have their brand that they're popular and intelligent. So they have a song about Harry Patch.
"How's the song?" Friedberger asks. "Is it 48 notes to the octave? What does it have to do with Harry Patch? Oh, my wife says I am being very rude. She doesn't like me insulting Radiohead. She's afraid they will send their lackeys through the computer to sabotage us. But they needn't worry -- we are a band that sabotages ourselves."
'I'm Going Away' is available now.
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