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They perform as a quartet live. Matt plays keyboards, bass, or guitar depending on the song (but mostly keyboard), Eleanor sings and plays guitar, and they've got a drummer and a guy who plays keyboards and bass.
This is what I wrote about their live show on my blog:
Wow. I really can't emphasize enough how different The Fiery Furnaces are live than on their album. The songs are still there, and their aesthetic is more or less entirely intact, but the arrangements of nearly every song is either subtly or drastically different from what you hear on the record. For example, "Tropical Iceland" was played as a keyboard-heavy upbeat pop song instead of a mellow art-folk number, and "Bow Wow" was played with a totally different (and far more harsh) keyboard sound. "We Got Back The Plague" was based more around the keyboard than the guitar, and Matt sang the verses, leaving Eleanor to sing the choruses. All of the songs were played much faster, especially "I'm Gonna Run," which was played nearly triple the speed of the album recording.
I enjoyed hearing the songs differently, and I appreciate that they treat their songs as living, changeable things. I've seen way too many artists who treat their studio arrangements with too much reverence and that can lead to rather dull and rote live performances. (I'm thinking specifically about Radiohead right now, who are certainly a great band to see live, but with few exceptions do everything they can to reproduce their album arrangements.) Playing the songs differently live also makes me think that they are more thoughtful and considered about how they make their albums, and that the consistency of quality and feeling on their album is no fluke. Everything about Gallowsbird's Bark seems much more deliberate now, and I like that.
I wouldn't say that the live versions were better than the album versions, though they were all quite good in their alternate arrangements. I'd love to get some live recordings of their shows so that I could get to know the songs this way, because when I was watching them last night, I couldn't stop thinking about the differences between the arrangements, particularly when they were so drastic that the music behind the vocal melodies were almost entirely different, as in "Leaky Tunnel" or "Asthma Attack." Almost all of the songs lost some of their subtlety and charm in their looser, more rocking live arrangements. I wish that they would slow down and take their time, if just a little bit. I can appreciate that they up the energy for their live performance - that makes perfect sense - but in the case of "I'm Gonna Run," it seemed like they were just a bit too frantic and shambolic for their own good. |
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