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Widow City

by The Fiery Furnaces

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On their fifth full length (and first for indie stalwarts Thrill Jockey), Fiery Furnaces have finally made an album that reconciles their need to make literate, strangely fashioned art-pop with their pummeling and super rocked-out live shows. It's tempting to wish that at least a few of these puzzling tunes could have fewer parts and to concentrate on the pleasant melodic elements more, or maybe just not switch back and forth between the piano-based songs and the guitar-based ones. But that's a bit like showing up at a MENSA party and complaining that folks are using too many big words; baroque, over-fashioned, and over-thought post-modern pop is what this duo does. On Widow City, the good-looking brother-sister team does it better than they ever have. This record's delightful and wholly original; no one else could possibly have made it. Reveling in a playground based on distorted riffs and deep space synths from the era of "album rock," their distended sounds swim about like hundreds of liberated sea monkeys. --Mike McGonigal