Ezra Furman’s latest album ‘All Of Us Flames’ is a whole city to explore
Chicago’s Ezra Furman shares their sixth masterful album
Photo: Tonje Thilesen
A dark city, everchanging and in perpetual movement, sizzling with painful hopes and complex sounds of infinite love bubbling from its core.
Engineered masterfully by John Congleton and built by Ezra Furman, along with her gang Ben Joseph, Jorgen Jorgensen and Sam Durkes.
You can walk across it in 47 minutes and 25 seconds, but it will remain on you for days. You have been warned.
As you enter its premises, you get hit by the unescapable realization that this place must be what came to be of the Transangelic Exodus triggered by Ezra Furman in 2018.
“This city is the bearer of an old and secret curse / It’s not written in your Bibles, it’s a verse behind a verse.”
It starts in whispers, and slowly, the sounds of the City reach out to your ears. Steps, heartbeats in drums, sirens, high-pitched screeches, low wailings of bass guitars. They grow until they fill every gap of silence. Then, they disappear in a vacuum.
Fists fall heavy on the keys of a piano in dark alleys. Shadows moving and scaring. Velcro guitars and battle drums. You’d better choose which banner you are marching under before it’s over. If you keep going, you will see the light of a miraculous sun at the end. This city is mean. It’s painful to cross it, let alone to live in it. Keep moving.
Lovers meet in a dumpster. Little more than children who hardly know the meanings in each other’s eyes, finding out about their bodies by holding sweaty hands. Dog days and never-ending summer nights. Gentle doo-woppy howling from the shadows make the dumpster the most beautiful place on earth, and the jingle of change is a tambourine; and the dust is snow, and fat metallic flies are sparks, and the ominous moon shines.
“Haunted eyes / You’ve got those haunted eyes / And your lips don’t move, but I can hear you talk to me / And I watch your haunted eyes / As they look out at the world / The world that never cared at all for us.”
The same moon, somewhere else, looks down on a limping vagrant crawling through dark back streets. She is looking for trouble to help her forget about the cold. She recalls memories through her teeth. Disjointed bursts of desperation and mad happiness. The blood moon is like a sunset at midnight, and you are forced to face the end of the world. Flying is possible when pain takes over your body entirely. Someone is leaving this city behind, but not you, not yet.
Preacher Ezra’s confused ramblings make more sense than many other theories on universal love. There’s a threat in her words and the unpredictable piano, blindly played inside abandoned cells where souls once lived and died. She can rally crowds of hopeless into rising against cities of sorrow and have us all singing for freedom, none of us missing. The core of her city is near. Embers of warm ache that the sky tries to placate, crying silently.
“None of us ashes, all of us flames.”
A convertible car cruises through the city border, sliding silently, dark buildings spreading in drops of rain on the forehead and in the eyes of a hopeful who gently demands:
“Point me toward the real motherfuckers.”
The power of words almost whispered softly and sharply, blades that won’t leave room for misunderstandings. And “motherfuckers” is the least dangerous of the sounds that Ezra utters. The earth underneath your feet yields, and your descent through the city’s inner complex sonic fabric begins. Angelic trumpets and murmuring saxophones cradle your body until it finally touches the ground in a pitch-black abyss.
An echoing song summonses. There’s magic in this place, witchcraft. You realize that the city is lined with it. Following tunnels, you get to the nucleus. Boom. A sudden explosion and beams of light, lilac and black, pulsate to the rhythm of a tribal dance. Your skin does not belong to you anymore, it twangs to the sound of a synth, your arms flap around, and you find yourselves chanting with the shadows.
“We’re out here on the attack / We wear the lilac and black / We might not make it back / We wear the lilac and black.”
A moment of sudden silence, a disturbance in the radio signal, and you doubt them eyes. Don’t. Watch the void sizzling in front of you. Sometimes when you’re flying, you think you are upside up, but you’re really upside down. You blink once, twice, three times, but you can’t tell. Scraping idiophones and pizzicato make falling sweet. Close your eyes. It is over.
Stones bounce against your window and sound like tom drums. Wake up. It is April 4th, 1993. Memory comes in waves. You swing back and forth in a dream of reverb pushed by Ezra’s voice. Angelic. Transangelic. Heavenly. You reach out to the dawn, levitating over the city of pain and hope, and when you are at one remove from it, you swing back, far away.
“How they’ll talk about you / How they’ll spill your blood / How they’ll love you when you’re gone for good.”
A pale sun sheds light on the filth and leaves everyone naked in front of mirrors. No more shadows to shroud yourself with to look magical. You are a single-string guitar that can’t hide the sound of fingers sliding across it, a clean voice that won’t shy behind the white noise of the night. Sing away, sing! You are finally someone, anyone; a procession of pilgrims holding shards of dreams in your many arms, cutting yourselves on the way to the temple. An eerie whistle takes you away. A lot of transformation going on, but you have not reached the other end yet. None ever gets proper closure in this city.
A flicker, and you are somewhere else. As your eyes shift, you see something. A vision of truth, sacred, delicate, almighty and yet lurking, waiting for your move. She never fulfils her threat but multiplies slowly, descending notes plucked on strings of nothing, choirs embracing you like dense smoke. It is nightmarish and dreamish and impossible to lean against, unattainable.
Time to say goodbye. Memories of faces and grins from your time in the city parade in front of you, melting slowly like dripping icicles, every drop a note from a harp. You squint in a vain attempt to grasp the meaning of it all before it’s too late. Once again, when you think you have caught it, it is over; you are already out of the city.
Looking back at it from the top of a mount, you see it for what It is: a whirlpool processing itself.
Less than an hour to cross it, years to reach its bottom, and long due.
