Ezra Furman @ Mississippi Studios
Joined by On The Stairs
Nate Clark of On The Stairs certainly knows h 2000 is way around a guitar. Throughout his set he weaves a reverberant web of bluesy surf rock with generous yanks on the whammy bar. Some songs evoke 60's era Beatles tunes, some are homages to muddy Mississippi blues, and others bring to mind Elvis in a Hawaiian shirt strumming a ukelele, accompanied by slide guitar. Clark deftly, almost lazily maneuvers up and down the neck of his red electric guitar, conjuring complicated melodies. Halfway through the set, Don Malkemus joins Clark to add some slow, thoughtful bleats of his trumpet, and Zach Moran arrives soon after to accompany them with his trombone. The effect is full throated and dreamy, filling the room with soft and piercing sound. On The Stairs is a Portland band, led by Nate Clark and including a rotating cast of characters. They recorded their first full length album, Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt in 2010.
Ezra Furman appears onstage and clears his throat a few times. “I lost my idea of a home,” he confesses. “So I wrote some songs to live in for a while.” He fiddles with a few tuning knobs, then adds, “I'm kind of embarrassed- I should've cleaned up a little.” Ezra Furman and The Harpoons formed in 2006 and recorded four albums before Furman broke apart and went solo. On the cover of his freshly recorded album entitled The Year of No Returning, Furman stares nakedly and defiantly into the camera, a vibrant trickle of blood escaping one nostril. From watching his Kickstarter video that he used to raise money to record this album, I learned that each song was written the morning after a bar fight. The first fight was an accident, but after a brilliant song came out of it, he was hooked and began instigating fights in order to feed his creative outlet. “ I had found the sick and painful cure to my artistic boredom and complacency,” he says in the video. “And that was violence.” It was then that I realized that this guy is not a typical folk singer.
Furman has a kind of raw energy that can really only be described as punk-- raucous, unconstrained, and laced with fury. Yet he is clearly deeply tender and trembling with emotion, like an open wound. His voice is dynamic and constantly changing, from a raspy near-scream to a lilting wail to a soft, scratchy whisper. There is no separation between him and his music; it is truly as if he is living inside of it. As a guest in his home I feel a bit out of place, just because it's so personal, so intimate. Furman can't help but show himself completely as he is; and that's what makes his music so powerful. His songs have a lyrical eloquence that prophesies the lasting quality of his music. There is something very current yet ultimately timeless about it. And although I feel compelled to make a comparison to another great song writer, Furman reminds us as he adjusts his harmonica holder, that he is “not Bob Dylan.”
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