The Post-Rockist

Matthew Friedberger
Winter Women/Holy Ghost Language School
[859 Recordings; 2006] 

Imagine you and I were having a conversation, and suppose I asked you who you thought my favorite guitarist of the moment is. For the sake of argument, let’s say you said Thurston Moore. I would stare at you blankly in response, because you clearly didn’t understand my question. Suppose you followed up with Jack White, in which case my whole body would heave in a fit of laughter because at that point I would know that you were surely fooling around with me. I would wipe a tear from my eyes and say, No, you’re wrong.  Funny, but still wrong. You could suggest Jesper Mortensen, a logical choice that would give me pause for reflection, but it would be a suggestion I would ultimately have to dismiss for the highly sought-after title of My Favorite Guitarist of the Moment.

Obviously, I would have no qualms about continuing in this obnoxious back-and-forth fashion until you realized that your only means of escape was to throttle my frail neck and run for cover. But I’ll give you a hint: it has to do with the subject of this review, Matthew Friedberger, one-half the talent of the Fiery Furnaces. Yes, Mr. Friedberger, with his Frankenstein grace and complete irreverence for economy in songwriting, can set my sympathetic nervous system on high alert like no other just by picking up a six-string. If my lower intestines were ever to spontaneously animate and burst out of my abdomen, wrapping themselves around a thousand guitars with ten thousand puckered fingertips, I reckon the sound they would make would be a close approximation to the noise generated by one Matthew Friedberger.

So it’s no surprise my excitement level was at an all-time high when I learned that Mr. Friedberger intended to release not one, but two new albums this summer: an operatic story record of experimental design, and a summery pop album featuring, and I quote, “a lot of guitar solos.” Sweet devilish symphony! What more could a nerdy music critic ask for? Well, more guitar solos for starters. Winter Women, the guitar-based pop half of Mr. Friedberger’s double-solo record, features prominent use of player piano, keyboards, synthesized strings, flutes, and programmed beats, but disparingly few mind-altering guitar solos. Nevertheless, one key characteristic that distinguishes Friedberger fans is their high tolerance for musical masochism: the more your desired guitar solo is withheld and obfuscated, the more ecstatic it sounds when it’s finally unleashed.

Take the vocals for example. Friedberger’s convoluted lyrics encompass a strange world of adventure pulp novels, Boy Scout reference guides, and lucid dream diaries, all intersecting and overlapping with no clear way to discern who is speaking or what exactly is going on. It’s like Vangelis doing Dylan. The language is so excessively loaded with particularities and specific tanglibles that the story is at once completely revealed and yet impossible to grasp.  In Winter Women, people don’t simply die, they suffer from “psychosomatic sudden death syndrome”; the narrator doesn’t just hold a job, he “was employed to sell new model ornithopers to the various Continental Kingdoms for General Oceanic Telegraph, as a sideline.” When we finally hear a repeated vocal phrase that resembles a chorus, we cling to it desperately like it’s the most rewarding chorus we’ve ever heard.  In most circumstances you might not consider the phrase “With Hair (Make-up, by the way) courtesy of New Top Ten Hair Design” an exceptional hook, but by the time you make it through Winter Women to the track “I Love You Cedric,” a neurotic song about the prelim rounds of the Miss Chinese Cosmos Pageant, you will consider it an impressive call to arms.

But for all this talk about the difficulty of Friedberger’s songs, it’s easy to forget that he does write some great hooks when he wants to. “Quick As Cupid” and “Do You Remember?” are two of the most effortless, upbeat pop tunes to shine this summer, while “Ruth Vs. Rachel” is easily one of the best tracks Friedberger has ever penned, a brisk romp unadorned by excessive studio trickery. And you cannot ignore the drumming on this record - Oh! sweet beats! Largely pre-programmed by Friedberger along with additional percussion courtesy John McEntire (he of Tortoise and the Sea and Cake reknown), the drumming is what holds these songs together, especially the easier to consume first half of the album. But what’s so remarkable about Friedberger’s songwriting is how little it takes to hold everything together - he can speak-sing the same storied melody over any combination of shape-shifting rhythms, and as a song like “Wisconsin River Blues” melds from sharp guitar stabs to distorted drum fills to a schmaltzy woodwind repose, the song still manages to retain some internal coherence.

If I was a lazier reviewer, I would listen to Winter Women/Holy Ghost Language School once or twice, lump both my reviews together and chuck it all up to more of the same from the Fiery Furnaces’ brotherly half. But that’s not how a Post-Rockist does business. We prefer to sink our teeth deep into the music, make it our sole source of sustenance for days out in a harsh wilderness, and then we’ll wait until we receive visions and instructions from on high before proceeding with a rambling, ill-informed review. But there are a few key differences that set this album apart from other Fiery output: One, most songs contain no more than one song. Two, the band’s popular reliance on nostalgic nursery rhyme schemes and nonsense alliteration has been forsaken in favor of robust, 19th Century adventure prose. Three, there is more flute. Love him or hate him, Mr. Friedberger is clearly intent on carving out his own ever-expanding chapter on modern music, and gripe though you may over his genre-defying pop songs, there is no one to compare him to other than Mr. Friedberger.

MP3: Matthew Friedberger - The Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company Resignation Letter (from Winter Women/Holy Ghost Language School.)

-Posted by Todd