5 out of 5

Produced by: Brian Deck

Label: Perishable

Califone eventually became folkier.  Fruit Bats switched labels and embraced Americana.  Modest Mouse, having achieved their Red Red Meat pursuit, dumped the sound in pursuance of pop.  The Fire Show…  The Fire Show just disappeared.  And bereft of production options of like-minded bands, Brian Deck wandered afield into alt-country or pop-folk acts which took advantage of his layered approach, but no one again seemed to touch the electro-ized, kitchen-sink chaotic folk all those bands – generally under Deck’s production – at one point typified.  Was it, perhaps, a more limiting genre than I realized?  Or maybe it was harder to work in for various reasons?

The latter point puts me in mind of the band of whom this review concerns; latching on to the brilliance Califone began exploring on their last outing as RRM, There’s a Star Above the Manger Tonight, ex-Number One Cup guys Seth Cohen and Michael Lenzi, renaming themselves M. Resplendent and Olias Nil, took the concept and ran with it, but way the fuck in their own direction and by the time of third album Saint the Fire Show, to territories of, like, minimalist terror folk previously unimaginable.  Nah, David Eugene Edwards, you can put down your guitar and your Southern drawl; your gothic gloom still differs vastly from the roboticized bleak oddities of a Fire Show.  And though I’m probably an unenlightened reviewer for saying so, my favorite version of this unique band’s entry into this most minimal genre is on this, their first album and their most accessible, before they took the concept to stranger conclusions and seemingly broke themselves off to non-existence in the process.  On The Fire Show, songs still exist, riffs still exist, and yet the whole disc is already notably off in some wonderful way, completely alienating while hooking you with a strange beat.

Songs drift in an out of structure; opening track F. Pilate even descends into utter distortion after its first couple bars before the guitar comes screaming back out into focus.  Cohen’s / Resplendent’s vocals float off key, following the guitar line and then warbling off into the ether; his metaphors hop from concept to concept but the tone of cautious dread toward the mysteries of reality is always right around the corner.  Partner Nil and producer Deck back this up with a cache of amazing sounds that you’re never sure are synthesized or live instruments, beats haunting between electronic ones and drums; the guitar captured as this most tinny and yet cacophonous crunch.  It doesn’t sound like a setup to promote hooks, but each song burns into your head with a memorable something or other, and then towards disc’s end we get a creepy, awesome cover of Bo Diddley’s Who Do You Love?, which sorta just shows how weird that song was in the first place.

At the time I took this for granted.  Those other bands mentioned were exploring different aspects of this sound, while Fire Show covered the slightly more chaotic, harsher, darker side of things. …While maintaining pop hooks mixed in there?… which is perhaps the only trace of Number One Cup to be heard.

And now they’re gone.  And though, again, going back to those other bands, I can give you their discographies as precedents or antecedents for the style featured on the albums released during this particular era, there has not been another Fire Show, and rarely has there been an album so wholly representative of its own unique sound as this one.