Speaking of interesting, the Fiery Furnaces have always a point of not making things easy for the listener. Debut album, Gallowsbird's Bark (2003) is a mess of styles and structures, and as with the rest of their output, you're never sure at what point you can settle down and just listen because the restlessness of the album makes for an uneasy experience. I guess that's kind of the point but I do sometimes wish that I actually enjoyed listening to their records for fun once in a while rather than for the lecture in post-modernism that it feels like you're receiving. The trustafarian white college boy blues that underpins it all is hyper-ironic and acts as little more than a jumping off point for a bunch of stylistic leapfrogging, from a kind of free-jazz to cock-rock and everything else in between and the whole thing is so intellectually frenetic as to be both frustrating and exhausting. When things do settle into a more straightforward pop structure ('Tropical Ice-Land' being the most obvious example) it feels a little bit as if you're being mocked by the band for being so boring as to wait for the boring pop song. I don't mind game-playing and I also don't mind being looked down on but I can't help but feel that the Fiery Furnaces adopt this mocking stance to really cover up the fact that what they're creating is actually rather hollow.
And that sense is merely increased by the follow-up, Blueberry Boat (2004), a double album's worth of snide shape-shifting which asks simply too much of the listener. Where Gallowsbird's Bark had at least a sense of adventure that you could share in to an extent, Blueberry Boat is an exercise in experimentation that couldn't care less whether you're there or not. It's a bold record, and it's certainly a clever and imaginative one, but it is also the most extravangant exercise in self-indulgence and although there's always room in rock for pleasing yourself before an audience the Fiery Furnaces too often seem like an experimental theatre troupe performing to their unquestioning mates rather than a band out to push boundaries to see what useful things can be found.
After a few stripped down solo albums, Kristen Hersh went back to the band format that had worked so well for her in Throwing Muses, but this time out she was in no-holds-barred mode with power-rock outfit 50 Foot Wave. The first self-titled mini-LP (2004) still has plenty of her superb songwriting skills and unusual guitar work in evidence, but it's all shown through a fog of blistering noise. Thudding, thumping, juddering rhythms and exhaust-spewing guitar noise are what Hersh felt would best show off her mood at the time and the wall of sound is really pretty breath-taking, but it's the fact that the songs, which really are as strong as ever, if a little less ornate or quirky, still make themselves felt which really impresses. I don't think Hersh will ever equal the work she did in the Muses, and it would be a tall order for anybody to reach those creative heights, but the take no prisoners attitude of 50 Foot Wave I find a lot more exciting than her solo work.
First full-length album Golden Ocean (2005) is more of the same thumping, pounding noise and although it has some superb songs on it it's telling that three of the tunes from the debut mini-LP are reprised on the album. Nonetheless this is still brutal, and brutally emotional stuff (the latter is what you would expect from Hersh in any event) and it's a demonstration that it doesn't matter how many knocks you take in your life or how long you stick at it, some people can come up with gold all the time.
The following year 50 Foot Wave released a free internet only EP called, appropriately enough, Free Music. It's a little more dense, a little less straightforwardly furious sonically and recalls the rougher edges of the Throwing Muses more than the other 50 Foot Wave records, but in many ways this faint softening of the edges makes it even easier to how just how adept Hersh is with an unconventional melody and how absolutely in control she is of her material. It's powerful stuff, in every sense.
Ha, that's funny - I had just finished writing the Filur bit (below) and remembered that I had forgotten Fila Brazillia's Jump Leads (2002). That tells you pretty much everything you need to know doesn't it? Inoffensive, clever-clever, garb-bagging electronica with a dance edge, it's all pretty nice but there we are...
Finally it's a compilation of material by Danish house-lite duo Filur. In Retrospect (2009), which covers material from the preceding ten years of its release, serves in many ways as a reminder that although most dance music of the 2000's ranged from the anodyne at best to the absolutely abysmal at worst there were some pockets of creativity. It's nothing to get too excited about but Filur were working in the surprisingly fruitful and oft-neglected space between the building-it-up, bringing-it-down crap-house of the clubs and the tedious ambient-pop of Morcheeba and the Aloof, and although each end was rubbish, the space in the middle had some serious potential. Filur managed for a short while to make charmingly unambitious pop music with a quiet house tinge and in the end they made the kind of records that Royksopp were too desperate to show how interesting they were to make. In Retrospect isn't going to set the world on fire and never was going to, but for a genre that was so bankrupt in so many ways it's nice to be reminded that it wasn't all total garbage.
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