The Fiery Furnaces are at it again. Except this time, I think I'm wise to their tricks.

When I last left Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, they were stationed at the helm of Blueberry Boat, a bizarre barge stuffed with some of the weirdest musical cargo I had ever heard. I couldn't help but be strangely amused by the whole of it, and some of the songs were actually a keen blend of electronica, purposefully sloppy rock, and an avant-garde, devil-may-care approach to songwriting. This year, they've followed that up with odds and ends EP, cleverly titled, uh, EP. And much to my surprise, a disc that I'd expect to be rather random and disjointed due to its status as a not-quite-full-album ends up being rather coherent and likeable.

I mean, shoot, they've even started us off with a single that wasn't actually on Blueberry Boat, and that single's B-side, attached together in suite format by a brand new song. These songs actually turn out to be some of the group's most straightforward and catchy. That's not to say that I mind having the rug pulled out from under me by a surprise shift in song dynamics, but let's be honest here - on Blueberry Boat, the Furnaces changed tempos more frequently than Jennifer Lopez changes costumes. Sure, things do get a bit weirder throughout the rest of the disc's 10 tracks, degenerating into complete silliness by the time EP is over, but this bite-size approach actually endears me to the group's wackier side instead of making me tire of it. Plus they don't get stuck in dirge mode, or wander completely independent of rhythm for too long, like they so often did on Blueberry Boat. Yeah, I think this one's a little more my speed.

A good description that I read of the Fiery Furnaces' music described it as being like the narrative sections of musicals, mostly sidestepping the full songs. If that's true, then EP is a good combination of the full songs and the cute little interludes. Eleanor's madcap blurting of lyrics is a little more balanced with conventional singing on a few of these tracks, and Matthew also seems to take center stage a little more often, instead of feeling like a sideshow. The siblings play their characters well, while backing players Toshi Yano and Andy Knowles anchor the songs with a strong rhythm section. The balance between convention and sheer lunacy ultimately makes EP a pretty darn good place to start for someone new to the Furnaces' style.

Single Again
I married another, oh then
I married another, oh then
I married another, he was the devil's grandfather
And I wish I was single again...
The blurting of synths and a vintage dance beat conspire to get us moving at the beginning of this Frankenstein of a song, which dares to put a playful spin on rather dark subject matter. Seriously, this might be the most fun song about spousal abuse ever recorded. (No, I didn't think "Goodbye Earl" by the Dixie Chicks was fun, but thanks for playing.) While the jaunty piano and creepy organ give off the feel of a carnival ride, Eleanor very plaintively tells us about marrying a man who put her through hell. "He beat me, he banged me, he swore he would hang me", she repeats several times, and she expresses the desire to be "single again". Eventually she gets her wish and the guy bites the dust, only for her to take up quickly with another guy and repeat the pattern all over. The music seems to want to distract from the tragedy, almost as if her blindness to the pattern is seen as a source of dark humor. But before we get to find out if the second husband mysteriously vanishes as well, the track changes and the drum beat carries us over into a much happier song.

Here Comes the Summer
December dark at six o'clock - remember?
The freezing wind gives you a shock - remember?
You knew it wouldn't be too soon
We'll have to wait until its June....
This is one of those songs that is always going to remind me of a place, because against all odds, I first heard it on a radio station while hanging out at Waikiki Beach on my birthday. It's very upbeat, and in a rare turn for the Furnaces, I actually connect with it on an emotional level. It's not a terribly deep song - Eleanor simply goes over memories of different points in time during a very long year she's had to wait out to be with someone, and she describes the weather in each instance as kind of a pointer to how she was feeling that day. The hook of the song is one that instantly digs in, and the guitar line doubles as a vocal line, so you're twice as likely to have the song stuck in your head. Just when you thought the Furnaces couldn't be bothered to come up with a poppy radio single, they did it, and most importantly, they did it without neglecting to put their own quirky stamp on it. My only complaint here is that the ending is abrupt as it comes crashing into a slower song - but I've kind of become numb to those sorts of transitions since they often happened mid-song on Blueberry Boat.

Evergreen
I would tend to my bees, sell honey on the road
Every fall in the wet watching lorries take their load
And I'd get all my winnings, ask for special sap in code...
The third piece of the trilogy is probably the weakest part - not a bad song, but the sudden drop in tempo causes it to feel like it lags a little. I mean, it's not super-slow, but it's kind of like one of those in-between sections of "Mason City" or "Chris Michaels" that I was tempted to tune out. Eleanor populates this one with a lot of nonsense lyrics about nature - perhaps she's even singing from the point of view of a tree? (If that's the case, Switchfoot beat them to it on a Christmas album several years ago.) One thing I really like about this song are the strong guitar solos - Matt squeezes a nice little fuzzed-out bridge out his electric, and the acoustic guitar offers a nice little outro as the song winds down.

Sing for Me
The April mud was on his boots, a-clinging through the fields
And desperate it send up its shoots, but at water's edge it yields...
Here Matt takes the mic, playing the role of a sailor or traveling businessman or somebody who misses either his wife or daughter or an important woman back home. Over a fanciful bed of fluttering pianos and a steady drum beat, he wistfully tells her that she is "the siren that will finally lead me home". Strokes of electric guitar give the song a muddier feel, contrasting with the pretty pianos, and it's a good example of creative instrumentation that doesn't go overboard. The song does get a little repetitive since it doesn't change in volume or intensity during its run, other than a slow but brief piano coda at the end.

Tropical Ice-Land
Take a Klondike bar from the pop machine
Hey it's ice cream, no not Coke...
Some warped screeching sounds and delirious synthesized guitar lines serve as a primal call, inviting the listener into an upside-down world. Here the band gives us a more rocked-out version of a song that appeared on their first album, Gallowsbird's Bark, and while I haven't heard the original, I love what they've done here. Eleanor fills our heads with more catchy nonsense (sometimes even backmasked) , competing with the noisy fuzz as she exuberantly tells us about her escapades in this geographically impossible place. I guess escapism is the key feeling here, and the band offers us a truckload of it. The song kind of falls apart into random piano tinkering at the end, but this kind of provides a lead-in to the next song (I thought EP's weren't supposed to do stuff like that, right?)

Duffer St. George
On a Spitalfields Sunday
Get a two pound curry and roll ups
Get a 12p bagel and a camouflage t-shirt and bracelets...
OK. After five reasonably straightforward songs (by Fiery Furnaces standards), it's time for a curveball. The intro here is pretty much manic banging on a piano, though I guess it's sort of in key, but still, it's kind of annoying. This settles into a fast-paced verse in which Eleanor rattles off more names and places and escapades, only to conclude proudly in the bombastic chorus, "Duffer St. George and I don't care!" Yeah. And if you've tried to make any sense of that, you're obviously missing the point. (The point being, presumably, that there is none.) I don't know; the song veers back and forth between being a source of amusement on a crazy day, and just an annoyance in between two better songs, so I could take it or leave it. The outro with the synthesized flute is kind of fun, but for the most part it feels like three song ideas needlessly crammed together.

Smelling Cigarettes
"Don't you key that brand new Camry."
And he gave me the curse of "Damn," returning to the spot he was
"Mind your own business you!"
And I wag my finger, "You're not doing what you're supposed to do."
This one starts out as a ponderous piano ballad about being broke and lonely, and winds up turning into a madcap adventure replete with divorced car thieves and runaway cats. Much like "Chief Inspector Blancheflower", there's some amusing dialogue going on in this song that allows Eleanor and Matthew to pull off odd rhymes that probably wouldn't even be attempted by the likes of Alanis Morissette. Hey, they have a knack for throwing in names and odd words and then trying to see what rhymes with them. I'm starting to wonder if maybe this was a game they played with each other as children. Anywho, despite the unsavory hobby of smelling cigarettes, this song ends up being an unpredictable tale of karma coming back to bite you in the butt for your bad deeds, and it runs the gamut of sounds, from unassuming ballad at the beginning to avant-garde rock in the middle, to a sloooooow piano interlude in the middle, to a cheery little finger-snap ending where Eleanor tells us again and again, "Don't you hurry worry with me" and "I'm gonna pack up your eyes with sand." Hey, lady, that's not very nice!

Cousin Chris
Back the bus, he cussed, space suits, blackened boots
Lad, little lad, he sad, I've a tip for you
See, what about me, what about her, what about me?
For some reason, I have to laugh at Matthew's weird little piano waltz at the beginning of this song, that trips over itself in an attempt to keep up with his ramblings. Eleanor eventually joins him, and soon the song turns into a psychedelic, winding mess of tongue twisters, made even more bizarre by the use of echo on a lot of the vocals. For some reason, the song still appeals to me in the end even though it was a bit of a headache to get through at first - I love the hollow thumping of the drums and the stuttering consonants that the siblings spit out as they attempt to alliterate nearly every line of lyrics. I'm not sure if "Cousin Chris" and "Chris Michaels" are meant to refer to the same person, but let me tell you, this is clearly the superior of the two songs, even if it's damn near impossible to make heads or tails of the lyrics.

Sweet Spots
Now Galewood makes me nervous, but the corn syrup cloud's such a lure
So I'm staying off to the side at this end of the M&M Mars tour...
The basic plot of a typical Fiery Furnaces song can essentially be summed up by saying, Well, I did this and then I went here." They sing about traveling to random destinations a lot, and that's basically what's going on here - a jaunt around New York for reasons undisclosed. A happily blurting organ and synths take center stage on this upbeat number, which has the unfortunate distinctive mark of a watery Eleanor vocal - just a repeating "a-doo-duh-da-duh-doo-dah" - that makes me want to reach into the speakers and strangle her. (You know, like her ex-husbands tried to.) It's a fine enough song if you like off-kilter ear candy, but it's one that I'm usually tempted to ignore.

Sullivan's Social Slub
Brandy Butterscotch bartered and begged
Manny Motherwell mustered and mugged
Lucy Liverspots lied, oh, and legged
Danny Dungerees digged and he dugged...
Ready for six minutes of utter insanity? (Hey, compared to eight or eleven, that might be a favor.) Matthew and Eleanor apparently decided that we hadn't gotten our fill of alliteration in "Cousin Chris", so they lay it on thick in this bouncy, squishy kids' song that must have come straight from the insane asylum. A little girl's voice can even be heard in the first verse before Eleanor takes over, and what starts off as a fanciful storybook-type tale rapidly turns into an absurd phonetic exercise, like something you might expect kids to be taught when they're learning their consonants. Whether it's a word with the chosen consonant stuck in front of it or not, it becomes a word here (hence the intentional typo in the title). It's funny, but it gets old fast, especially when you have lines like "Andy Aspirate a**holed an ape" thrown in there.

EP definitely has a stronger first half, but even though some of it misfires, it surprises me how well the old and new material (some of this stuff dates back to songs they were working on for Gallowsbird's Bark holds together). If I had my way, I'd probably take the first five tracks plus either "Cousin Chris" or "Smelling Cigarettes", slap them onto a CD with about nine tracks from Blueberry Boat, and call it a really good Fiery Furnaces album. In any event, I hope the Furnaces learn from this little bookend project that craziness is a bigger asset to their music when it's used in moderation along with a subtler quirkiness that gives some of their songs a little breathing room. Whatever the case, I'm intrigued to see what they come up with for their next full length, which I've heard is already in the works and will involve the vocals of their grandmother or something bizarre like that.

OVERALL WORTH:
Single Again $1.50
Here Comes the Summer $2
Evergreen $.50
Sing for Me $1
Tropical Ice-Land $1.50
Duffer St. George $0
Smelling Cigarettes $1
Cousin Chris $1
Sweet Spots $0
Sullivan's Social Slub $.50
TOTAL: $9

Band Members:
Eleanor Friedberger: Lead vocals, guitar
Matt Friedberger: Vocals, guitar, piano, synth, organ
Toshi Yano: Bass, synthesizer
Andy Knowles: Drums

Website: http://www.thefieryfurnaces.com

Recommended: Yes

Great Music to Play While: Driving