Ezra Furman - All of Us Flames review: Moving on from despair

In contrast to the pure punk anger of her last album, Ezra Furman now sounds beatifically calm
David Smyth25 August 2022

In 2019, on Ezra Furman’s last album, she sounded furious. An American solo artist who has previously incorporated doo wop, girl group stylings and rock and roll influences into her wiry indie rock, and reached a wider audience by providing the soundtrack to the fun Netflix series Sex Education, on this one she was channelling pure punk anger. She described it later as “a controlled forest fire of negativity”.

In contrast, this follow up sounds beatifically calm. The opening song, Train Comes Through, is in no hurry to build from its initial distant synth drone to the steady guitar chug that eventually materialises. The next one, Throne, has more power and urgency but there are grandiose horns doing the heavy lifting rather than anything rawer.

The change in outlook seems to have come from finding solidarity with likeminded individuals. As a minority within a minority, a trans Jewish woman, she’s long felt isolated. There’s a new confidence here with that status. On the slow-burning centrepiece Point Me Towards the Real, she imagines being on her first day free from the “County Cook Psychiatry Institute” and choosing to spend her time with people who really matter: “I’ve been lied to and abused/Time to try to heal.” On Lilac and Black, which begins as a piano ballad before unveiling a glamorous Eighties keyboard line, it sounds like she’s forming an army: “Tonight I’m dreaming of my queer girl gang/We who walk this deadly path/And the city that tries to kill us each night/Will soon bow before our wrath.”

Her scratchy singing voice still gives away her lo-fi origins, though she gets closer to something like a croon on Poor Girl a Long Way From Heaven, which also sees her reaching up for a sweet falsetto. Otherwise, the music is increasingly ambitious. Forever in Sunset sounds arena-worthy with its moody electronic pulse heading towards a mighty chorus. The swinging Dressed in Black also has a grand, cavernous sound.

On the powerful, emotional Book of Our Names, from where the album draws its title, she sounds ready to go down in history: “I want there to be a book of our names/None of us missing, none exactly the same/None of us ashes, all of us flames,” she sings. It’s a unifying statement on an album that has moved on from earlier despair and sounds like it’s looking towards a bright future.

(Bella Union)

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