The Fiery Furnaces, The Fillmore, San Francisco

Capacity 1250. All ages.

      In the Red corner: Mario! the Nintendo favorite. In the Blue corner: Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Bonham and John Paul Jones, the whole Zeppelism. Mario's goal: to playfully obfuscate, set up smokescreens, and perform other assorted musical mischief so that the long-haired ones don't get too comfortable in their castle in the sky. Points for every step on the Stairway to Heaven that Mario gets to douse with vegetable oil. Careful with that game console, little girls and boys!

      The assault of impenetrable but cheesy keyboards (embodied by Matthew Friedberger) on plain, rocking riffs (sister Eleanor) is the Furnaces' ring setup, not just on the recorded albums but sometimes more so, in their live shows. For the June performance at the Fillmore, and reportedly for the whole summer 2006 tour, Mario was, for better or for worse, absent. (Huge sigh of relief here.) Also absent were Olga Sarantos and the ghost of William S. Translation: there were no keyboards (a few samples), Matthew stuck with the guitar. And unlike at cut-up shows of earlier variety, all songs were performed in their linear progression, true to the albums' liner notes but with delivery certainly not replicating the recorded sound. I was a bit too excited to take down the setlist, for reasons explained below.

      But first, the opener, Man Man. This man, man, man, man, man troupe from Philly was part deranged cabaret, part Dada's stillborn pony, part John Waters. Their musical arrangements seemed secondary to the theatrics—does pausing a cacophonic keyboard solo to blow a single dissonant note from a trumpet count as the former or the latter?

      The Furnaces started in the usual uptempo and played most songs from their five albums, lacking the more melancholic ones. Matthew on guitar and Eleanor (sometimes) on guitar were assisted by a drummer and a bassist, making for a true rock'n'roll sound. On songs from Rehearsing My Choir, Eleanor dialogued animatedly with herself. With an English major's diction and Zeppelin hair covering most of her face, she was hard to keep eyes off... and yes, there was the obligatory "this is dedicated to my boyfriend"—presumably the esteemed Archduke Franz of Austria—Asthma Attack (can you tell I'm just a tiny bit jealous?)

      Ah then, the costume show. For the evening, I got me a pirate outfit and a few boxes of blueberries. Another friend went as a pirate wench. The plan was to pass out the berries—presumably recovered from Cpt. Friedberger's Blueberry Boat, sunk by pirates in the Taiwan Straights— to show attendees. Best blueberries in the US of A, high in antioxidant content, just what the aging indie kids need to get them through the night of hard drinking. Alas, the boxes were detained by the Fillmore nazis. But then, the show was quite poorly attended, less than 50% full; it looked like our act could have been hopelessly lost on most of those present. So, we resigned to doing a silly pirate dance and waiving binoculars. Enough to be remembered by the Fillmore staff the next time we showed up...

-Vladimir Gusiatnikov 06/21/06