Firewater’s April 2008 release, The Golden Hour, has been widely hailed as its best album to date, rich with instruments (some played by native musicians), stories and sounds reflecting an adventurous trek across the Middle East and Asia.
The careful weaving of sitars and trumpets with bongos and a heavy bass line provides for a collection of mostly original, festive and danceable songs. Sprickled across the album are many additional instruments that date hundreds of years, like the tumba, chimta, and dholki.
MP3: “Some Kind of Kindness” by Firewater from The Golden Hour
MP3: “6:45 (So This Is How It Feels)” by Firewater from The Golden Hour
The Golden Hour is very much founding member Tom A.’s musical travelogue featuring influences from journeys across Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan and India. Tod A. chronicled his travels in the blog Postcards From the Edge of the World. Having recently divorced and disgusted by the re-election of President Bush in 2004, decided to leave the U.S.
The album contains some stand out tracks, including “Hey Clown”, “Borneo”, “Feels Like The End of the World” and “Some Kind of Kindness”.
Firewater: Founded, 1995
Firewater is a continuously morphing, work-in-progress indie collaborative outfit from New York that has actually been around since 1995, when grunge was all the rage.
Firewater’s 1995 debut album, Get Off The Cross (We Need The Wood For The Fire), was not well received by critics and the band failed to gain a notable following.
Three years later, the band returned with the same formula and line-up, including Soul Coughing drummer Yuval Gabay and Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison, to release its sophomore effort –
The Ponzi Scheme. The album contained a few worthy songs, but for the most part was largely dismissed.
It wasn’t until 2001’s pop-heavy Psychopharmacology, featuring saxophonist Ori Kaplan and sitar player Oren Bloedow, that the band made a breakthrough, receiving wide praise, including a 3.5 star rating from the All Music Guide.
“Psychopharmacology contains the requisite disgruntlement of a Firewater album, and all of angst-ridden underpinnings of testosterone-laced pop.”
The band took another hiatus, but pumped out two respectable albums in less than a year – 2003’s “stripped-down, razor-wire-wrapped effort” The Man on the Burning Tightrope, followed by Songs We Should Have Written in 2004.
With the release of
The Golden Hour, and an impressive performance South by Southwest, plus plenty of the all important ‘blogger love’, 2008 may be Firewater’s biggest ever.
It doesn’t hurt that over the past couple of years indie rock music featuring sounds from other cultures and instruments has gained popularity, evidenced by popular indie artists like Beirut, The Decemberists and Vampire Weekend, to name a few.
The downside of Firewater’s collective music catalogue is that much of it sounds too much like the Squirrel Nut Zippers, and at times conjures up images of a drunken Uncle Bob attempting to dance in the backyard after an outdoor barbecue, when most of the guests have already left.
If you’ve been following this series, you know that the playlists feature an eclectic mix of artists and sounds. This next installment for our favorite indie music songs of 2008 features more ‘popular’ indie artists and those who remain famously yet-to-be-discovered.
