EzRA FURMAN Transangelic Exodus
Out and proud electro-rock from “the Queer Springsteen”.
BEllA UNIoN 8/10
Just over a year ago, Ezra Furman headlined the Roundhouse in London, where he was carried onto the stage in a coffin. this, he now says, was the ceremonial funeral for the Boy-Friends, his quartet that spent the last two albums specialising in thrilling pastiches of classic garage rock.
the band hasn’t actually changed – it’s still the same quartet Furman’s worked with since 2012, including saxophonist/ producer tim sandusky and guitarist/ keyboardist Ben Joseph – but now their music flashes and shimmers and burbles with the thrum of electronics and digitally mutilated instruments. Fans of 2013’s Day Of The Dog and 2015’s Perpetual Motion People will have to wait until track nine before they get their reassuring blast of bubblegum rock’n’roll from “Love You so Bad”, but even here it comes with a twist – bassist Jorgen Jorgensen switches to cello and transforms the song into a Michael Nyman miniature, all sawing strings and chugging, machine-like rhythms.
Accompanying this sonic makeover is a sudden lyrical frankness: this is a defiantly queer album. In interviews, Furman has long talked of gender fluidity and bisexuality; at gigs you’ll invariably see this observant Jewish musician wearing figure-hugging dresses and haphazard lipstick, but until now his lyrics have avoided direct sexual issues by using non-gendered pronouns. Each track on Transangelic Exodus, however, seems out and proud, each told from the standpoint of a man in love with another man.
On the hymn-like “Compulsive Liar” – a minimal, piece of electronica with poetic lyrics that, like Leonard Cohen’s “suzanne” or Paul simon’s “America”, don’t rhyme but flow perfectly – Furman’s narrator tells us, “I have one fatal flaw/I’m a compulsive liar”, explaining that his deception comes from years spent hiding his sexuality in “the old protective closet”. On the jagged postpunk of “Maraschino-Red Dress $8.99 At Goodwill”, the cross-dressing narrator howls about the difficulty of obtaining a thrift-store frock over a volley of Bunnymen guitars and Banshee drum pounding. Most remarkable is the final track, a swaggering piece of glam rock called “I Lost My Innocence”, where the narrator tells of losing his virginity “to a boy named Vincent”, accompanied only by “a box of Girl Scout thin-mints and a pack of
Winstons”. It might be the first glitter-pop masterpiece that’s explicitly about two teenage boys having it off with each other – it’s certainly the first which narrates a chemical distillation of sexuality in the protagonist’s cerebral cortex. “I can feel the sections of my brain detaching,” he howls. “I can feel the fluid in my head go bad.”
One linking narrative, repeated in more than half of these songs, is the word “angel”, and how these angels are persecuted by society. these aren’t the benign angels of, say, Mervyn Peake’s
Mr Pye or Wim Wenders’ Wings Of Desire – in Furman’s fictional universe, this
“transangelicism” sounds more like a curse or a deformity. the feathered wings on these freakish, supernatural deities attract hatred and suspicion, and require brutal surgery. the opening track, a postmodern springsteen voyage entitled “suck the Blood From My Wound”, sets up a scenario in which the narrator busts a recovering angel from hospital (“peeling off bandages
to unfold his wings”) before speeding off on a thrilling road movie. In “Psalm 151” (a gorgeous ballad based around one of those classic rising sixth intervals, like “My Way”), the narrator apologises to his beloved for the state of his wings.
In nearly all these songs, the action takes place in moving cars, where the angelic male lovers are on the run from some authority figure. the woozy synth-pop of “Driving Down to LA” sees Furman insist that “it’s the law that’s bound to drive me faster”; on the stomping, minimal postpunk of “No Place” the narrator escapes civilisation in a red Chevrolet Camaro.
the album paints a dystopian society in which the freaks are being hounded by the fascists, but – in sonic terms, at least – the freaks are winning. Furman is battling a strain of rock nostalgia which has always tended towards the oppressively heterosexual: in his defence he invokes the spirit of rock’n’roll’s great gender benders (Little Richard, Bowie, Lou Reed) while inventing his own 21st-century tropes. Both sonically and lyrically, it’s an album that is explicitly, thrillingly transgressive, and is already an early contender for one of the albums of the year.