From the Vault: The Fiery Furnaces Interview
In 2008, I interviewed the mercurial, outspoken, and often times wonky Matthew Friedberger of The Fiery Furnaces for The East County Herald newspaper. Here, in its entirety, is the clunky, humorous, sometimes incendiary transcript of the exchange I had with Matthew. Known for their staccato production, esoteric lyrics, plunking pianos and rarely middling subject matter, The Chicago siblings have been both darlings and foes of...
Interview w/ Colleen Green
Fuzzy, dirty, rollicking guitar riffs that feel like you’re being bludgeoned with a pillowcase full of Pop Rocks and fireworks. Ethereal and airy vocals that perforate the buzzing instruments. Lou Reed sunglasses and some jagged abandon define the mercurial, sonic, who-gives-a-fuck offerings of Colleen Green. With her newest record, Milo Goes to Compton, the barbed songstress juts her fingers across her guitar and offers...
Interview w/ The Wooden Birds
Andrew Kenny’s achingly ethereal voice whittles away your preconceptions about what a band, emotionally, is capable of doing. The singer-songwriter has been a workhorse when it comes to traveling coast-to-coast – he has done it practically nonstop – throughout his career; if you tracked the flight lines across the United States it would look like a cat’s cradle. Kenny, whose fame came from the critically lauded...
Interview w/ Freezepop
Listening to Freezepop is akin to watching a rainbow perform harakiri; neon colors jut out everywhere. The band’s sound is a dichotomy of saccharine and cyanide, a swandive into a pool of glitter and reverb. Freezepop’s lead singer, the multitalented Liz Enthusiasm, pulls back snarky syllables with the bowstrings of her lips as she feathers them through the band’s musical compositions. How can you not like...
Interview w/ Motopony
Motopony’s frontman, Daniel Blue, lulls out achingly barrel-aged vocals on the band’s self-titled record. The airy and yet splintered delivery of Blue is reminiscent of Neil Young’s rasp and Bon Iver’s maimed whispers. The salted-emotions of Blue and company aren’t epigenuous as they seem, and, by merit of their minimalist compositions, crawl and brood under the surface of the band’s warbling...
Interview w/ Sage Francis
Sage Francis is a poet laureate. Crowned with a sweaty brow and an open palm, his movements are deliberate and without reservation. The mercurial wordsmith and the Rhode Island emcee released his newest record, “Li(f)e,” earlier this year. The LP, not atypical of the artist’s intellectual bloodletting, uncoils with introspective buoyancy. Enlisting some of the biggest movers in the music industry, Francis cut tracks with...
Interview w/ Holly Miranda
“The Magician’s Private Library,” an eclectic gnashing of marred horns and spectral pianos, is a brilliant offering of jazzy-distortion and airy vocals. The perpetrator of the album, whose music is both quietly sinister and radically unchained, is Holly Miranda. The musical maven was somewhat of a wunderkind, learning piano and guitar at an early age, and eventually scored a short-lived record deal with BMG at...
Interview w/ Fever Ray
Karin Dreijer Andersson isn’t homologous with her music. The cryptic and ethereal sounds of Fever Ray, clawing its way out of some uncharted land that sounds of writhing ghosts and dystopia-like themes, is brooding with ideas. The seemingly enigmatic Karin isn’t so perpetually intangible as one would think, the artist says, as she concedes that her body is merely a vessel for her mysterious vocal entities. The music works...
Interview w/ The Clientele
Haunting reverberations bob and slink, effortlessly bringing fourth frayed images of meandering uncertainty and fallen loves, each time The Clientele’s music is heard. This is how Alasdair MacLean utilizes his hushed, buoyant and atmospherically drenched vocal delivery as the band’s frontman.. MacLean’s voice, a ghostly pulley that lifts monochrome memories and fluttering echoes of despondency from his mind, is an abyss...
Interview w/ Here We Go Magic
Effervescent echoes and spectral instrumentation waft through the air, creating, what some might call, a symphony of lo-fi harmonization and hauntingly desperate ambiance. Here We Go Magic’s self-titled debut album has, in the last few months, gained a lot of notoriety with music critics. Pitchfork named the work an honorable mention for their best album list of 2009, while, according to Spin and Under the Radar magazines, Here...
