Album Review: The Fiery Furnaces - Take Me Around Again

Heard it all before? It all sounds the same is a common complaint, and one often thrown at folk-tinged garage bands. The Fiery Furnaces do at least try to do things a bit differently – from the throb of electronic beats they sometimes sneak into their output to the bizarre cut and paste approach taken to last year’s live album Remember, which had about three years’ worth of gig recordings spliced together into an odd aural patchwork. But there is a reason their latest effort seems familiar.

Take Me Around Again, their ninth – Jesus – album in around six years (on top of Matthew Friedberger’s recent solo mission – prolific, huh?), is essentially an alternative version of I’m Going Away, their eighth album, released earlier this year. Still with me? Not so much a remix album in that there’s no obvious electronic tampering – save the 8-bit glitchiness of ‘Drive To Dallas’ – this is more a full reworking of what went before. The pair claim that only the lyrics remain untouched, the words like ghosts wandering around a new building, bumping into walls that haven’t always been there.

The track listing tries to spice things up further, billing this as some kind of bout, with one or the other of the duo putting their name to each song. Opening with the title track of that last album recut twice could be seen as an ironic turn. With both of them telling their version of events, the idea they’re probably trying to get across is one of sibling rivalry spiralling out of control. But ‘I’m going away / I’ll be back some old day’ is an empty threat when that distant occasion is actually a few months on from the last record.

This wants to be creative differences laid out for the world to see, with Eleanor finally given some say in the studio, but there is no build up of tension. Instead, it sounds remarkably uneventful. The music might be different, but the effect is much the same. The comparatively uncluttered production of I’m Going Away, which shied from the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink attitude the band have often adopted, is still quite straightforward here, especially now the pair’s ideas have been stretched across two albums.

The song craft is often so simple that it’s hard to imagine it could have been written any other way. But with a surprising lack of drama, this might be for hardcore fans only. And with a bit more breathing space between albums, there might feel like more of a need for this.