The Fire Show
Saint the Fire Show
[Perishable; 2002]
Rating: 8.7

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Damn. Looks like we lost power again. Happens pretty often here,
especially on the hottest days. System overloads cause brief glitches and
outages, draining the power we take for granted from our appliances and
modern devices. Unsaved data is lost, the fan stops circulating the air. And
when normalcy resumes, the clocks come back confused, blurting "noon" at
intervals until reset. As strong as we like to think our technologically
advanced society is, it's telling that the electricity and power that we rely on
daily are brought to us by an exceptionally fragile network, vulnerable to
malfunction at millions of points.

Art has long been the mirror to society, from the physical and philosophical
ideals suggested by Greek statuary, to Picasso's cubist deconstructions of
wartime massacres and Hendrix dismantling "The Star-Spangled Banner" to
simultaneously explore his patriotism and his disgust with the Vietnam
War. So, as we as a society become more reliant on technology to aid us
and remember the details of our lives for us, it seems logical that music--
perhaps the most immediate and cathartic art form available-- should
explore the intricacies of our relationship with technology. It also bears
noting that music, a capella singing notwithstanding, is a technological art
form, relying on the inventions of human hands to produce and capture it.

In their unfortunately brief time together, Chicago's the Fire Show were
more than willing to explore the possibilities and limitations of the
equipment they had to work with, often exploiting its limitations in the
service of expression. Last year's mini-album Above the Volcano of
Flowers came across as something of a mission statement-- the mission
being simply to move forward and create something genuinely original and
affecting, a feat the band seemed utterly prepared to accomplish.

And with their swan song, Saint the Fire Show, they do. The album is a
dark, unpredictable maelstrom of ideas, emotion and haywire technology,
at times disquietingly calm and at others in danger of running completely
off the rails. The band opens the album in a strange place with the crippled
hymn "The Making of Dead Hollow," and for some, its intense strangeness
may be somewhat offputting. But I suspect that it's for this very reason
that the band sequenced it this way-- that perhaps it's a means of weeding
out the faint of heart before they've invested too much. Here's how it
unfolds:

M Resplendent's mournful falsetto hangs in empty air, untouched and
natural. It moves in simple, drifting phrases, never wavering or faltering, as
sampling, peculiar noises and oddball musical passages crop up alongside
it. A clanging drum beat, a vicious guitar, reprocessed vocals and
soundtrack strings all threaten Resplendent's moody vocalizing, but
nothing really takes a swing until a full-band rhythm rises at the song's end
for an instrumental coda.

The rest of Saint the Fire Show is hardly as weird, but no less inventive.
"The Rabbit of My Soul Is the King of His Ghost," one of several
outstanding tracks on the record, kicks in with harmonized guitars before
dropping a colossal groove, funked up by Pyx Klos' rubbery bass.
Resplendent sing-speaks his way through the post-punk landscape as
Olias Nil injects layered backing vocals and heavy-echo tape effects. "Dollar
and Cent Supplicants" is eerie and arctic, with chilly pianos swimming
through frigid oceans of reverb. Sampled operatic interjections aside, the
song is utterly skeletal, and as such it's the most piercing thing here,
Resplendent's voice crawling up your spine to whisper, processed, into
your ear.

"The God Forsaken Angels of Epistemology" creeps in on a bed of fuzz and
heavily compressed drums. The strings return here as well, pumping
necessary organic sounds into the electronic stew. Resplendent's delivery
on the chorus is so perfect, it's easy to miss that the only thing backing
him up is the percussion. But Saint the Fire Show is the kind of album
where the details sneak up on you like that-- most of it is so perfectly
layered that it tricks you into thinking there's more going on than there
actually is.

For instance, "Useless Romo Cravings" never places more than four
instruments behind the vocal at one time, yet the way it's recorded gives
the impression of intricate overdubbing, the sound washing inland like the
first break of a tsunami crashing through a coastal metropolis. The joint
production work of Graeme Gibson and Brian Deck is stunning as well-- the
duo focuses on injecting space into the dense mix, and as a result, the
bass still seems to float, even when weighed down by overdriven cymbals
and piles of keyboards.

The closing dirge "You are My Sunshine" (yes, that one) uses a scarcity of
sounds to elevate itself from an ironic cover into something genuinely
desolate and despairing. I'm absolutely positive that, while writers Jimmie
Davis and Charles Mitchell certainly didn't intend the song as some kind of
joyous celebration of humanity, they never meant for the song to sound
quite this desolate. The Fire Show focus on the plea of the line, "Please
don't take my sunshine away," spinning it into a visceral anguish, with the
album's final embers burning out slowly as a wrecked trombone enters to
sweep aside the catharsis.

And that's right around the time that you realize this is the last you'll ever
hear from the Fire Show. The individual members will likely move on to
other things, but it's an absolute shame these guys won't be operating as
a unit again, because, in simple terms, they were tremendous. Two brief
documentary segments are included on this disc for your enlightenment,
though they offer no insight into the band's decision to call it quits. But
there is one small comfort: at least this band left us their masterpiece
before they departed.

-Joe Tangari, August 7th, 2002