The Fiery Furnaces
Remember [Live]
Release Date: Aug 19, 2008
Genre(s): Indie, Rock
Record label: Thrill Jockey
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Album Review: Remember [Live] by The Fiery Furnaces
Fairly Good, Based on 2 Critics
Based on rating 6.5/10
M.C. Escher Gets His Ya-Yas Out! might have been a more appropriate title to the Fiery Furnaces' two-disc, forty-song live album, which encapsulates three years of touring into two brutally twisting, shapeshifted hours of synapse-shattered art-pop. The live music picks up where the studio recordings left off, as Matthew and Eleanor Freidberger push their sound into even more off-kilter rooms of sideways, aural-illusion deconstructions.
Based on rating 6.1/10
A hopscotch across three years' worth of live material is jarring; pristine studio-quality recordings dissolve into rough passages poached from bootlegs, often within the same track. These questionable production decisions are to Remember’s benefit though, owing to the scattershot nature of the source material. The band’s trademark nü-prog meanderings and flagrant disregard for solid tempo are given weight by the Frankensteinian patchwork.Notably missing from Remember is the crowd noise, excised almost entirely in the mixing process, rendering most of the tracks staid and clinical.