A Soundtrack for the Falling Leaves

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun
NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

Pop music doesn’t always change with the seasons, despite all the evidence for seasonal listening. Spring and summer are perfectly suited to ecstatic, big beats that blast through parks and cars with the windows rolled down. But as the leaves change and the fall harvests ripple through chefs’ seasonal menus, you don’t expect music to follow with a similar change in mood. When it does, though — as on the new albums from Band of Horses and the Fiery Furnaces, both out today — the results can be bittersweet and oddly thrilling.

Band of Horses’ “Cease to Begin” (Sub Pop) differs dramatically from the group’s heralded 2006 debut, “Everything All the Time.” Co-founding guitarist Mat Brooke left the band last year, leaving the group as a trio anchored by songwriting vocalist-bassist Ben Bridwell, alongside drummer Creighton Barrett and guitarist Rob Hampton. The band also fled its Seattle base for Mr. Bridwell’s South Carolina home, and “Begin” follows a similar trajectory back to Southeastern roots.

If “Everything” was a slightly southern rock version of the Pacific Northwest’s current crop of Built to Spill, the Shins, and Modest Mouse jangle pop, “Begin” runs through early R.E.M. toward an even more seminal Southern pop signpost: Big Star. And Mr. Bridwell isn’t channeling the power-pop Big Star of “In the Street” and “When My Baby’s Beside Me,” but the melancholic dreamer of “September Gurls” and “The Ballad of El Goodo” — songs that echo autumn’s start of life’s decline.

It helps that Mr. Bridwell’s slightly adenoidal, imperfect voice lends his opaque lyrics a quavering vulnerability. A soft beat and wistful guitar arpeggio maintain the near-lullaby pace of “Detlef Schrempf” — obtusely named after a German-born basketball player — a song that’s part admonition and part friendly send-off. Tersely addressing an unnamed subject, Mr. Bridwell’s lyrics pirouette around some unspecified past trouble while bidding farewell. “So take it as a song or a lesson to learn,” he sings, “and sometime soon be better than you were.”

It’s a smile in the face of sadness that permeates the album’s strongest tracks. The sprightly guitar line and swaying melody of “No One’s Gonna Love You” undercuts the bitterness of the title and the first verse, which culminates in the subtle twist of the initial chorus: “But no one is ever gonna love you more than I do.” The song doesn’t settle for such easy reversal, though, as Mr. Bridwell’s lyrics turn the chorus’s devoted promise into an emotional weight as the relationship goes south and “things start splitting at the seams and now / It’s tumbling down … hard.”

The gently rocking “Ode to the LRC” is a gimlet-eyed examination of life in a small Southern college town, while the opener, “Is There a Ghost,” firmly establishes the album’s hovering mood, insinuating past lives with the present over an anthemic rush of guitars. “Cease to Begin” only really falters when Mr. Bridwell tries straight-ahead country rock, for which he settles into literal storytelling instead of 20-something ambiguity. When Mr. Bridwell focuses on being blurry, though, Band of Horses offers something refreshingly unlike boilerplate indie rock.

As the Fiery Furnaces, brother and sister Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger have released four albums of radically different indie rock. The Brooklyn-based duo’s influences run from show tunes to arcane experimental rock and everything in between, and the results are consistently inconsistent, as likely to please as they are to perplex.

The Fiery Furnaces are also one of the few bands that fare best when aiming high. Where 2004’s “Blueberry Boat” felt a bit like Frank Zappa rewriting “H.M.S. Pinafore,” the new “Widow City” (Thrill Jockey) feels like “Orpheus and Eurydice” as fractured through Charlie Kaufman. A woman is set to be found guilty by the “Philadelphia Grand Jury” in the seven-minute opening song, and what follows through the album’s 16 tracks could be interpreted as her actual or metaphorical journey into some post-mortem netherworld — or merely a sentence worse than death: exile to a nameless American exurb.

Musically, “Widow City” runs the band’s usual gamut — from jaunty piano-driven cabaret (the aforementioned lead-off track) and easygoing lounge (“My Egyptian Grammar”) to bubbling marches (“Automatic Husband”) and flat-out rock (“Navy Nurses”). Of course, that’s merely the basic blueprint; within each song reside more ribald turns and stylistic changes than a drag show. Eleanor Friedberger is the band’s resident Ann Magnuson, treating the lead vocalist position as equal parts spoken-word performance artist and lead actress, each song a short film cycling through a small cast of characters and conversations.

The Friedbergers somehow make such kitchen-sink work more often than not. In “Wicker Whatnots,” a filigree of guitar notes and a collage of drum fills sculpt the darting background pulse, over which Ms. Friedberger sing-speaks such discursive storylines as: “You can immolate all those oxen, you can sacrifice so many sheep / You can be surrounded by your 400 pomegranates and your bright brass shovels / but you still can’t hardly sleep.”

Such intellectual density is what makes “Widow City” a resolutely fall album. It’s a musical compliment for doing Saturday’s crossword puzzles in the park while swaddled in turtlenecks and scarves and late-night discussions about references in Thomas Pynchon novels and parsing Carroll Dunham’s visual vocabulary. And while such back-to-graduate-school pop is equal parts pretentious and precocious, it’s to the Fiery Furnaces credit it’s so imminently fun. Just what does the hieroglyph for “French canal boat” have to do with the woman who blacked out on the morning of her eldest daughter’s second wedding in “My Egyptian Grammar”? Who knows, but the seductive lounge sway and singsong melody makes unpacking the cloaked meanings a gratifying, if ultimately meaningless, diversion.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use