The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #154

#154: "Ex-Guru" (2007) - The Fiery Furnaces

A couple of years ago, ln the way home from work, I heard about The Fiery Furnaces' new album Widow City on NPR, and they played snippets of a few tracks, and I loved what I heard. When I got home, I bought and downloaded the album from iTunes, and I listened to it that night from start to finish. It wasn't easy listening.

I'd heard The Fiery Furnaces before, and I really liked their song (I don't quite consider it a single, and neither do The Fiery Furnaces) "Quay Cur" from 2004, and in that song, guitarist/songwriter Matthew Friedberger showed a powerful penchant for atonal alliteration and Woolvian free association and Dadaist imagery as well as Don Van Vleet-inspired musical noodling and some catch-as-catch-can song structure. "Quay Cur" proved to be a masterpiece of an avante-garde EP, but it demands close attention and repeated listening, and it's a mammoth of a track: it runs over ten minutes, and it feels like it lasts at least twice that (and that's not a perjorative comment), and so it doesn't quite fit here.

What does, though, is "Ex-Guru," one of the myriad of wonderful, strange songs from Widow City (one of the best albums of this decade). It's probably the catchiest from the album, and the one that works best as a single, and--if they'd ever released one from the album, it probably would have been the one with the best chance of charting. It's uptempo, it sports a blithe bouncing rubber ball of a synth line in the verses, and the chorus clings to the memory. The literate words and kooky imagery might sound a bit odd to those unaccustomed to such, but the rest is just pure pop smarts...until the 1:25 mark, when the bridge arrives just in time to explode.

"Ex-Guru"'s bridge drove my wife nuts. I was playing her the song in our Jeep on our way home from school the next day, and she seemed to be enjoying the record, and then the bridge hit, and before it (the bridge, which--in feel--is more of a coda than a bridge) ended, my wife screamed at me to turn it off, that it was driving her crazy. I did. We soon pulled in the garage, and she looked at me, and she said, "If you ever play that [pretty little ditty] in front of me again, I'll give you an even bigger headache than the one I have now. It was pure chaos, and I don't like you very much right now. Go pick up the children. I'm taking a nap."

Now, if that isn't a recommendation that something wild and crazy is going on here, then I don't know what is.