AEM084 Forest Fire

Let’s part the cur­tain for a moment and acknowl­edge that most bands that you will hear about and have heard about over the last five years, even at the low­est and most fleet­ing lev­els of blog fame, either have a catchy and authenticity-enforcing back­story (Antlers, Bon Iver, Pas­sion Pit), a friend in high places, or the abil­ity to tire­lessly email tracks to blogs and talk them­selves up in every pos­si­ble loca­tion and at every pos­si­ble oppor­tu­nity (or hire peo­ple to do so). This isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing (okay, yes, it usu­ally is a bad thing, but a few of these bands are actu­ally great); it just tends to be how the game works. It makes for some funny con­tra­dic­tions, espe­cially when peo­ple argue that the inter­net hype cycle is some­how more artis­ti­cally pure than the now-faltering inde­pen­dent label system.

For­est Fire, on the other hand, have inverted the entire hype sys­tem with what at first seems like a curi­ously self-negating approach to being an internet-age band. They don’t have a bio or a label (though I’m sure they’ve had plenty of offers in regards to the lat­ter, and Infi­nite Best has reis­sued their highly praised debut album Sur­vival on vinyl), and their MySpace url is fuck­forest­fire. It’s puz­zling at first for a jour­nal­ist who is used to pars­ing through end­less band bios jammed full of unwar­ranted com­par­isons and mushroom-cloud sized hyper­bole in search of some straight bio­graph­i­cal info, and it is ter­ri­fy­ing that it took me as long as it did to real­ize that they do this because it gives writ­ers no choice but to pay atten­tion to the music, music being the thing that bands play if you’ve for­got­ten, which I pretty much had. And it works because the music is really, really good.

The no-bullshit atti­tude of the band matches their sound per­fectly: their songs are tough and sim­ple and not at all flashy. Mark Thresher’s vocals echo the slur­ri­ness of Marc Bolan, only a lit­tle more pissed off and less hung up on sex, and the song­writ­ing shares some qual­i­ties with elec­tric T. Rex as well, turn­ing unadorned and delib­er­ate (and often deli­ciously slow) strum­ming pat­terns into mem­o­rable rock songs, songs which func­tion not as fixed pieces to be mechan­i­cally repeated, but as tem­plates for the band to play with live. It really says some­thing won­der­ful about a band when every ver­sion you can find of a par­tic­u­lar song sounds dif­fer­ent.  For instance, an early live video of B-side “For­tune Teller” (which inci­den­tally starts with one of my new favorite first lines: I only wanna seem good in front of the right peo­ple.) adds some eighth-note soul piano, elec­tronic drums, punchy alto sax, and swoopy key­boards. Thresher is also laud­ably unafraid of let­ting his voice be heard, espe­cially live, where he some­times backs off from the mic to let out a full-voiced shout that almost makes him sound like a lost mem­ber of The Band.

Both of the tracks from this Ampeater sin­gle are songs that appear on the band’s afore­men­tioned Sur­vival LP, but these are live-recorded (and even more stripped down) ver­sions that the band did for a Rough Trade bonus EP. Bands often expose their weak­nesses in live and stripped down set­tings, reveal­ing song­writ­ing that turns out to be pal­lid with­out flut­tery arrange­ments, gui­tar solos that reveal that the album’s solo was the best take out of 50 and vocals that would do bet­ter buried to the neck in gui­tars, but For­est Fire’s songs may even sound bet­ter when they’re pared down to almost noth­ing (not that the album’s arrange­ments are par­tic­u­larly florid, but still). Some­thing about these ver­sions of the songs pulses with a badass energy that tops even the per­for­mances on Survival.

A-side “I Make Win­dows” starts with some sim­ple flute, tam­bourine and gui­tars. The chords are a pat­tern you’ve heard a thou­sand times before, but they have that mys­te­ri­ous renew­able qual­ity unique to all great rock songs where they some­how don’t remind you of any other song, and when the vocals come slid­ing in with the title phrase, it’s just per­fect. For­est Fire are care­ful not to put any­thing unnec­es­sary in their songs, and the twangy elec­tric gui­tar that fills in a few of the empty spaces leaves just as many alone, because that spa­cious­ness is a cru­cial part of the song, in the exact way that the line that starts the sec­ond verse is fol­lowed by about 12 sec­onds of open space. It takes a lot of matu­rity to let the songs unfold at their own pace, what­ever that pace may be. The addi­tional vocals on the cho­rus are per­fectly under­stated as well, only leap­ing out of uni­son and into har­mony occa­sion­ally, keep­ing the song tight and tough where, with the wrong choices, it could have been anthemic in the worst way (imag­ine the hugest pro­duc­tion you can, with like 40 peo­ple singing that cho­rus and an orches­tra and lots of boom­ing drums). The gui­tar solos that fol­low each cho­rus walk the fine line between melodic lines and spiney, dis­so­nant bursts, and the fact that they do so in the most exposed set­ting pos­si­ble makes them even more impressive.

“For­tune Teller” starts with that per­fectly inci­sive first line, which, like much of “I Make Win­dows” unfolds with a sure­footed slow­ness and let’s you know that there’ll be no wast­ing words here. The song then then climbs in ten­sion to the line why not kill some­one you hate?, which I’m going to main­tain is a pretty bold idea to express in a rock song, espe­cially when your band isn’t one that specif­i­cally gains cred from being edgy or buries its lyrics in lay­ers of noise. It’s a hair out of con­text here, but to me it sounds like an expres­sion of the frus­tra­tion of being forced into all sorts of stu­pid social niceties.  The phrase gatling gun social skills touches on a cer­tain vio­lence and cold­ness that lies under­neath all the phony hand­shak­ing and schmooz­ing required of most of us every day. A slightly out of tune toy piano is sprin­kled through­out the song, one of the only arrang­ing touches besides the shak­ers and tam­bourine that carry the rhythm, lend­ing the whole thing a slightly creepy air that fits with the sharp dark­ness of the lyrics. In both songs, For­est Fire pull off the other rock n roll mys­tery trick of mak­ing things that are out of tune sound totally legit and not fishy at all.

For­est Fire deserve your ears not because they don’t have a band bio or because I find thought­less inter­net music writ­ing irri­tat­ing, but because they write fan­tas­tic, sub­tle songs and per­form them with­out hold­ing back. They are one of a dwin­dling crop of bands find­ing lis­ten­ers almost solely on the basis of their music, and that means a lot at a time like this.

Gabe Birn­baum

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