Judge The Fiery Furnaces on the schtick alone and you'd be forgiven for assuming that this brother-sister Garage outfit are slavishly following the dusty template wheeled out by this season's favourite bands. But whispers of the ghost of Oz Mutantes inhabiting 'Gallowsbird's Bark' should alert you to something more, well, off the beaten track.
And off the beaten track it certainly is. Wonderfully so, in fact, as Eleanor and Matt Friedberger do for the blues what Mutantes did for Brazilian pop and psychedelia. And, as Andy Kershaw would no doubt tell you, that's a marvellous thing in this era of style mag repro-history.
A scrapbook of surreal imagery and geographical distortions of place and time, the songs glide over a globe of their own imagining. From the 'Tropical Ice-Land' where we run into "stray ponies and puffins" to Turku where a servant girl sang the author a "song or two", these places seem to inhabit a melodic universe light years away from our mundane realities. You assume that the Friedberger family have rarely travelled but are in possession of a magical atlas. Or perhaps some underground guidebooks that go way beyond the standard Lonely Planet issue.
Holding together this melange of high quirk lyrics and plinkingly charming piano lines is the oddly compelling voice of Eleanor; always seeming to ground the sonic eccentricities with a fantastically paced delivery. She testifies on the straight bluesy roll of 'I'm Gonna Run', delivers perfectly timed lyrical gems throughout the vaudeville of 'Bow Wow' and takes charge of the elements in the whirlwind of 'Gale Blow'.
And it's all perfectly formed already with so many pop wonders carelessly scattered throughout this fantastic record that you can only assume it all comes shockingly easy. A unique musical vision with a genuinely unique and beautifully skewed worldview to boot. Cast aside the schtick, you really haven't heard anything like this before.
