Hello sunshine. Hello Eleanor.

So. I don’t know how well The Brothers know The Fiery Furnaces, the wilfully leftfield band that consisted of Eleanor and her brother, Matthew. They were like nothing else – a knotty indie band that wrote dense, weird songs with names like “Chief Inspector Blancheflower”, “The Philadelphia Grand Jury” and “The Old Hag is Sleeping”. Their songs’ lyrics sounded like they were some little known novel, and the structure of their songs were often really strange, veering off into different time frames or arranged in several parts.

Now, that makes them sound WAY harder work than they were. They were a bit eccentric, but they were surprisingly easy to love. Well, by me, anyway. Marc Riley used to play them loads on 6Music and I fell for them, bit by bit.

Adam Buxton, on his excellent podcast, recently did an episode with Eleanor F – one that was actually recorded a couple of years back, but for some reason, he wasn’t happy with. I don’t know, I found it charming and it really got to the heart of his subject. As an intro to Eleanor, you couldn’t do any better. I’d strongly recommend listening:

What’s clear from that is that her brother was quite the control freak in the band, and she felt trapped and straitjacketed in the band. Since their seemingly permanent hiatus, she’s started to carve out a strong solo career of her own, with a series of increasingly accessible solo albums, of which is the 4th, and in my opinion, the strongest.

Despite her brother’s control freakery, you can hear in Eleanor’s solo work that she was very much a big part of the Fiery Furnaces’s sound, not least because her beguiling vocals define so much of their output. She’s still fond of obtuse lyrics at times, and slightly wonky music. But what she has done is grown in confidence in writing more direct pop songs – and unlike the FF, this more pop than rock, I think. As you know, I think the P word is much maligned and is one of the highest art forms on Earth! Writing the perfect pop song: what a skill.

So what we have here is Friedberger at her warmest, her most human, her most direct. She hasn’t lost her leftfield edge, and to me, this still feels unusual and far from generic. But has she ever written as out and out a cracking pop tune as ‘Make Me A Song’? There’s a lovely mix of slow jams and uptempo numbers, and the songwriting throughout is A class. Great for lazy summer days too.

Hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am. This Furnace is perhaps less fiery these days, and more smouldering. It’s working for me.