PopMatters' Best 60 Albums of 2009

To find the jump-off for the Fiery Furnaces’ I’m Going Away, it is useful to return to the band’s 2003 debut Gallowsbird’s Bark. An injection of pre-rock and roll era sounds into the so-called garage rock revival, it was a raw music revue—a blues/folk/gospel/cabaret catchall that made room for plaintive numbers like “Rub-Alcohol Blues”, the up-tempo stomp of “Asthma Attack”, swaying s ing-along “Up in the North”, and jagged, raw-boned pieces like “Don’t Dance Her Down” and “Crystal Clear”. Among reactions to the album was a too-convenient pigeonholing of the band, normally with reference to other superficially similar acts like the White Stripes, whose members had posed as brother and sister early in their career. But the Fiery Furnaces’ Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger—actual siblings—represented a very different interpretation of related influences. Whereas Jack and Meg White played the role of lo-fi blues punk roustabouts, the Friedberger characters were from the beginning more literate, well-traveled types prone to a distinctive brand of experimentation. These bands didn’t need to battle, because their courses were equally valid, fresh revitalizations of the building blocks of rock.

As if the blues weren’t already dark enough. For the entirety of the Dead Weather’s debut album, Horehound, Jack White—who, in a commendable show of ego control, relegates himself to the drum stool for this, a sure-to-be successful supergroup (dirty word, I know) he somehow managed to cobble together in the downtime between fronting two of the only signs of life in today’s alt-rock landscape—Alison Mosshart and company are visibly determined to imbue an art form which is already obsessed with depression, loss, and all manner of cheerful things with even inkier shades of the human condition.