“Waiting to Know You”
from the album Bitter Tea
2006
Download an MP3 of “Waiting to Know You” from Fat Possum Records
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This is their fifth full-length album in three years, making the Fiery Furnaces the hardest-working eccentrics in indie-rock — not just in productivity, but in the inventiveness and density of the private code in which Chicago siblings Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger write their songs. Although the Velvet Underground created the blueprint for the Furnaces’ style 40 years ago — a child prodigy’s lyrical eye and unschooled melodic ear, sung-spoken vocals, savage electric guitar outbursts — they never got their granny in to sing, as the Furnaces did on last year’s Rehearsing My Choir. So how do they follow that? By going back to the dawn of the synthesizer era and psychedelic backwards-taping, among many other textural effects, some eerie, others charmingly silly. The poppy “Waiting to Know You” is marred by their playful self-sabotage. Despite the mismatches of mood and style, wistfulness accumulates throughout this album’s 72 minutes; there’s an intriguing inwardness at the heart of this most cultish of bands.