The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #134

#134: "Duplexes of the Dead" (2007) - Fiery Furnaces

We round out this week with one of the strangest songs on the chart, at least in terms of structure. That fact shouldn't be surprising coming from The Fiery Furnaces (previously seen here on the chart), whose every studio LP & EP are filled with non-traditional song structures. The Furnaces--Brooklyn siblings Matthew and Eleanor Friedlander, plus a semi-regular combo of musicians, including drummer extraordinaire Robert D'Amico--throw oddball twists and about-faces in their songs, changing time signatures and key melodic lines at often seemingly inopportune moments, just when the songs' hooks start to catch.

In "Duplexes of the Dead," songwriter/producer Matthew Friedlander plays it fairly straight (for a Furnaces' record): the song's tempo never changes, the time signature doesn't change, and no extra melodies or song segments are dropped or lifted. What's odd about this one is that it lacks a chorus. The vocal melody is catchy, though, and as are Eleanor's vocal dips, as are the string segues, as is the interlude; with as many hooks as this two-and-a-half song offers, it doesn't need a chorus. Blink and you'll miss the fact that you missed it. It's great pop music, avant-garde or not. It'd work great as the soundtrack to a movie trailer, a thriller perhaps, for as background filler, it's a killer.

The song deserves a better fate, though, because it's not just a catchy tune; there's something deeper afoot. The lyric's an elliptical narrative, an existential short story, and the characters--a husband and wife on their honeymoon--highly resemble Port and Kit Moresby from Paul Bowles's novel The Sheltering Sky. Like those two characters, the husband and wife in "Duplexes of the Dead" have an emotional and sexual disconnection. The husband immerses himself in his work, in trying to grasp the ungraspable, in trying to locate the mystique of the abyss, and his wife wanders, and if you remember the novel....

Matthew Friedlander augments the sense of alienation and displacement with hazy, alluring yet disorienting production. He adds strings that seem to have traveled from Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir," and a wonky, pulsing synth background that might have made a trip over from The Rolling Stones' album Their Satanic Majesties Request. This Eastern sound placates for a bit, but then Friedlander drops D'Amico's surf drum rolls and some Kid A-era Radiohead synth blips and bleeps to add tension. Eleanor's vocals add to the exoticism and eroticism, as her tone is somewhat confessional and somewhat distant, mirroring the conflict in the music.

By mixing all these disparate elements together that never quite properly congeal (and I believe that's purposeful), the Fiery Furnaces have given us a record that correlates to America's current fascination and revulsion of the Eastern world, of a people and a culture we can't quite grasp, a lifestyle so completely and utterly foreign that we can't help but stare and ask, "What does it all mean?"

I've often asked the same about the Fiery Furnaces early records, where the experimentation seemed without purpose. Here, in "Duplexes of the Dead," I believe they've found their purpose, as the form matches function. I don't believe they've found the answers to their questions, but their questions now make sense, and they're all the more disconcerting because of their soundness. It's fascinating. I can't look away.