Hall of Fame

Before coronavirus intervened, 2020 should have been the year that live audiences were reintroduced to The Fiery Furnaces. A comeback show at Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago was in the books for July but, like the rest of the summer schedule, the pandemic’s long since nixed it. Still, the NYC brother-sister duo have pressed ahead with their other plans, announcing their signing to Jack White’s Third Man Records last month and, in the shape of new single ‘Down at the So and So on Somewhere’, releasing their first new music since 2009 LP ‘Take Me Round Again’.

Their story began, however, with gloriously ramshackle debut ‘Gallowsbird’s Bark’. Released in 2003, the sprawling 16-track effort remains the purest distillation of The Fiery Furnaces blueprint - giddily uninhibited and riddled with quirks and idiosyncrasies. It’s an unrefined run through myriad genres; blues and early R&B are at its core, but it finds room along the way to squeeze in noisy, piano-driven rockabilly (opener ‘South Is Only a Home and ‘Inca Rag/Name Game’), experiments in groove (‘Crystal Clear’), and glimpses of the keenly melodic pop they’d go on to pursue on later records. Some tracks, like ‘Don’t Dance Her Down’, cram all of the above into the same three minutes.

At the time, critics and fans alike held onto some skepticism over Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger’s claims to be siblings - not least because The White Stripes, who successfully pulled off that ruse themselves, were in the ascendancy with ‘Elephant’ around the same time. ‘Gallowsbird’s Bark’’s diffuse thematic approach will have done something to fuel that too, though; just as the sound of the record is scattershot, so too are the stories Eleanor spins here, less character studies than they are esoteric vignettes. All are delivered in a sort of undulating, half-spoken drawl - languid one minute and fierce the next.

It made for the kind of overall package that, when taken to its logical conclusion on 2004 follow-up ‘Blueberry Boat’, led to sharply polarised views: one notable review labelled the release “toe-curlingly unlistenable”. On reflection, however, ‘Gallowsbird’s Bark’ fired the starting pistol on one of the most singular runs of records of the noughties - a daring debut with little regard for genre boundaries. The Friedbergers make for an endearingly odd couple, in more ways than one; the promise of a first album in 11 years is one of the few positives we can salvage from 2020.