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| Is there a trailer for Transangelic Exodus? |
Believe it or not, this post will be the first time I’ve had to publicly manage gender pronouns (yes, I probably need to get out more). So, to both address it early and explain an editorial choice, Ezra Furman is a gender-fluid musician, and someone who has taken a very thoughtful approach to the entire question of how to identify. Based on what I’ve read, it was only this year (2019) that Furman started identifying as transgender.
As for the pronoun choice, I’ve read one interview from this year that used “he,” and another interview that used “she.” Next, there’s Furman’s twitter bio: “my pronouns: he/she/him/her.” More than anything else, however, I to take my marching orders from this direct quote (from “one interview” above; good one, too):
“Sometimes I wonder what there is to say about it. Or maybe I feel tired of obsessing about it, caring about how I said it, worrying about people’s reaction and such. My dream has always been that it could be a non-issue, or at least, as much of an issue as any cherished part of who I am.”
The Independent went with “he/his,” and I will as well for the remainder of this post. If Furman ever puts his foot down one way or the other, I’ll honor his choice. More than anything else, I find Furman’s specific gender identity the least interesting about him. Because I think he/she kicks 20 asses, dammit. And I think the world of his/her music…and, yes, I’d struggle with “him/her,” because, clunky, but I would still respect the choice.
OK, on with the rest of it.
Personal
As much as I shit on Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, I owe them for a lot of my new crushes. They fed me Furman’s “Tell Em All to Go to Hell,” a screed of a song that layers garage-rock production on a classic 50s tune (as the garage-rock originals did). The vibe borrows from punk – a culture that’s very much part of Furman’s work – but, as he often does, he drops in a blast from a saxophone that gives the track another dimension. I loved it the first time I heard it, and tagged him as someone to go deep on in the future. The future arrived the day after Spotify passed on “Evening Prayer aka Justice” (great, yet challenging protest pop) and the lacerating, “Thermometer.” Both of those came off his latest, Twelve Nudes, by the way.
A Little History
“Furman is a mesmeric presence. He’s tender and thoughtful, but also fidgety and occasionally distracted. For someone who struggles with eye contact, his on-stage transformation is improbable.”
I’ve never seen Furman perform (and will be rip-shit pissed if he hangs up his guitar before I can), but you can get a pretty good sense of him during his video interview with AV Club Sessions after his second-most-recent album, Transangelic Exodus came out (2018). If nothing else, you’ll see the above description in action, all the way down to the issue with eye contact. He also lets slip this confession very early: “I tend to like pretentious stuff.” He embraced the word “pretentious” to answer potential criticism of someone in the punk world making a concept album, but “pretentious” can double as a pejorative for taking risks and breaking out of pigeonholes.
I started there because, frankly, Furman’s history is boring. He’s very together, he’s always managed to be independent – when he went solo, he took a pass on finding a label (and he had one before) and funded his first album, The Year of No Returning, via Kickstarter (savvy; early adopter) – and I have yet to stumble on anything messy (e.g., star-fits, drug problems) in anything I’ve read or watched about him. (Damn millennials. So freakin’ together.)
Though Chicago born and raised, Furman formed his first act, Ezra Furman and the Harpoons, while at Boston’s Tufts University. That band put out four albums between 2006-11, plus one odds ‘n’ ends farewell compilation, and Furman moved onto his solo career from there. After putting out The Year of No Returning, he toured with a backing band he called the Boy-Friends, the line-up of which featured Jorgen Jorgensen (bass), Ben Joseph (keys/guitar), Sam Durkes (drums), and Tim Sandusky (saxophone; Sandusky would also produce the next several albums). Seamless as I’ve made all that sound, it came neither easy, nor from an expected place:
“The music fans of the UK changed my life forever. They ruined it. I could have been somebody. I might be a doctor by now if it wasn’t for the music fans of Manchester.”
Like more than a few independent acts before him, Furman caught on in the UK before getting anywhere in the States. That kept him going long enough to put out Day of the Dog in 2013 and Perpetual Motion People in 2015. The same line-up would change its name to the Visions (because, in Furman’s words (from the AVC interview), “the mission has changed”), by the time Transangelic Exodus dropped in 2018, and the current discography wraps up with 2019’s Twelve Nudes, by which time, according to Wikipedia, was released by “Ezra Furman & the band with no name.” Then again, they don’t have a specific entry on Twelve Nudes, so who knows? That said, I think this quote does a good job capturing its spirit: “This new record sounds like punk music you can swing to. What is it about a song that makes you dance?”
Fun (and Less Fun) Details
- Furman is very careful about his lyrics (and it shows), because he knows he has to sing them over and over while performing them.
- Just…everything about this passage (and from a 2019 interview, so the ending seems fresh): “Furman, whose grandparents survived the Holocaust ‘because they were paranoid enough to leave home’, is an observant Jew who never performs on the Sabbath and recently considered quitting music to train to be a rabbi.”
- His politics are my politics: “There’s not, like, royals beheading peasants like there used to be, but they just found a different way to dress it up. Working people are killing themselves to get by, and they’re working for billionaires.”
- Also, this, which is massive: “punk rock is a kind of music you can mostly know when you hear it, while punk is a strand in art, style, and philosophy, like Romanticism. It's attained a level in the history of art that can be drawn on in diverse ways. It's one of the guiding philosophies of my life — not fearing any authority on earth.”
Last Words After a Week of ‘Im
“A bratty, ragged take on New York Dolls, Spector-era Ramones and E Street Band carnival rock. An unexpected gem.” (from a review of Day of the Dog)
“But his thrilling songs – inspired by the earliest rock’n’roll, doo-wop, The Velvet Underground, Springsteen and Jonathan Richman – found a burgeoning audience drawn to their author’s unflinching frankness.”
You can slip potential influences under Furman all damn day, because he’s very restless artistically, and I fucking love restless artists. That said, the broad formula mostly remains the same: he builds his sound more by arrangement of instruments in combinations and silences, than tricks of production. The tempos moves all over the place – often within one song – and he lends them a sense of progression/destination by adding new instruments in later verses and choruses. He’s very inventive on melodies and, no, none of that tracks with what most people get by word association with the word “punk rock,” but Furman comes very, very much from the punk tradition. And I think that’s the best fair warning I can give to anyone who tends toward poppier pop music: Furman’s voice holds a variety of notes, but it’s raw – if you’re used to Beyonce, you’ll find it grating – and the overall sound is…just rough.
The one exception to all the above is, actually, Transangelic Exodus. In that AVC interview, he confessed some jealousy about the production tricks available to people playing the other genres. And that’s definitely his most “produced” album (e.g., “From a Beach” and “God Lifts Up the Lonely”), but “old Ezra” comes through on tracks like “No Place” and “Peel My Orange Every Morning.” I didn’t pull a lot of songs from this one onto the Ezra Furman sampler I’m posting to Spotify when this goes up – just “I Lost My Innocence” and “Suck the Blood from My Wounds” (the best blend of “spare Ezra” and “produced Ezra” for my money) – because it’s one of those rare albums that you should listen to as an album. It’s a narrative with a soundtrack, basically, with moods matching story. And it’s good.
That said, I’m still losing my shit over both Day of the Dog and Perpetual Motion People. I slept walk through pulling seven of the 20 songs on the sampler from the latter – to save me some work (I don’t have to link to everything, dammit!), my three favorites are the beautifully-bopping “Restless Year,” the anthemic ode to despair, “Ordinary Life” (brilliant lyrical melodies on that one) and the meditative “Haunted Head,” which gives a good example of how he “builds” a song – e.g., adds pieces to give it a bigger ending. Going the other way, I concentrated on cutting back on tunes from Day of the Dog, so it got only five in the end. To call out a good cross-section (and this is where you’ll find “Tell ‘Em All to Go to Hell”), “I Wanna Destroy Myself” shows how well Furman handles “punk” energy, “My Zero” shows how well he handles an acoustic-backed ballad (and the build on this; also wonderful), while “Been So Strange” splits the difference between them in multiple ways.
Both The Year of No Returning and Twelve Nudes are very good albums, and they only suffer by comparison to the other two. No Returning is mellower – Twelve Nudes was written in anger, recorded quickly, and sent out raw into the world – but getting into an argument that I’ve got his best albums all wrong wouldn’t remotely surprise me. At any rate, my stand-out tracks from those would be (and these are all on the sampler): from 12 Nudes “Rated R Crusaders” (art punk) and the ballsy rocker, “Trauma,” and from No Returning, the moody, musically lush “Queen of Hearts,” and the pretty damn fun “That’s When It Hit Me.”
In closing, I can’t fucking wait to see what Furman does next, even if it’s just ditching Ezra for Esme (the reference is in there; that’s a great song, and the comments (when I checked) are genuinely moving, and it’s a good song…I just like all the ones on the sampler more). These are all brilliant albums and I haven’t heard anything that excited me this much….well, in a couple months. I’m pretty excitable, as it happens.
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