When Matt Friedberger told me last year he was working on an album with his
grandmother, I assumed he was joking... or at least tossing around
creative possibilities never to be fulfilled. Now,
just over a year after the Fiery Furnaces' universally acclaimed
Blueberry Boat, here is proof that he was entirely serious.
In some
ways, the very theatrical tone of Rehearsing My Choir only extends
the pageant-driven excesses of Blueberry Boat. It is a concept
album, as Blueberry Boat was not, telling the life story of a
grandmother-aged character, in a dialogue between Olga Sarantos and Eleanor
Friedberger. Sarantos, with her deep, elderly rasp, represents experience
and disillusionment, Eleanor hope, faith and young love. Matt stays
mostly in the background, commenting occasionally through Greek-chorus
singing, but more often through the swirls and eddies of instrumental
music. For example, in the closing "Does This Remind You of When?", Santos describes
a wedding ruined by construction noise; you can hear both the chapel organ and
a distorted howl of guitars as backing sound.
Rehearsing My Choir is full of cerebral pleasures — the joy of
hearing Sarantos mouth those rhyming couplets so often written for Eleanor,
the constant interplay between spoken word, song and instrumental
accompaniment, and the surreal glimpses of past lives afforded by these
songs. Yet it is also devoid of anything like a hummable single. And
unlike Blueberry Boat, it is not tied together by musical
themes; there are few repeated motifs or melodies like the one that
united "Blueberry Boat" with "Quay Cur." The link is more narrative than
structural, and in that way Rehearsing… is more like a radio play than
an album. It
requires attentive listening from start to finish, and your enjoyment
depends more on your ability to follow the story than any musical
distinctiveness on the album's part.
And then there's the question of Sarantos' voice, which many people have
found grating. I am personally too old to object to anything very strongly
on the basis of age, and yet her voice is a rough, oddly shaped instrument to
emerge in any work of indie pop. There's something sort of tragic about her
singing, even when the material is not, which makes for an interesting contrast
with Eleanor's untouched alto. Her announcement in the title track
that "There was one man... with whom I didn't get along," accompanied by
downward marching piano notes, has a ravaged drama to it that Eleanor can't
match. No one her age could. So is it mellifluous? No. Is it a unique
and appropriate instrument for this particular work? Yes.
My feeling is that Rehearsing My Choir is an odd, initially
indigestible album that is far more interesting than most people are
willing to admit. Its theatrical excesses are really only a step or two
out from Blueberry Boat, and they are tied much more strongly to a
continuing story. It's not easy pop. It may not even primarily be
music. But if you applaud the Friedbergers for breaking structure with
their earlier work, you can't exactly scold them for going too far here.
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