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The Fiery Furnaces' hyperactive creativity keeps them fascinating in concert, on record, and on Remember's one of a kind fusion of those worlds.
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UncutIt's frequently infuriating and sometimes amateurish, but nevertheless adds up to the most succinct introduction yet to the wonderul warped world of the Friedbergers. [Oct 2008, p.86]
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What you do get is indie prog impeccably performed by musicians at least as talented as Mars Volta but with better taste.
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So take Remember as a legitimate, new way to approach the group’s solid collection of music, but don’t expect an emotional experience. It’s a text, not a souvenir.
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Under The RadarAs a document, Remember is indispendable, but after a while, it all becomes one long melody, and you start to miss the variety in tempo and the robust sonic architecture. [Summer 2008, p.82]
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Remember will not win the Fiery Furnaces very many new fans, but as it is likely the closest thing to a greatest hits album the unconventional Friedbergers will ever produce, it goes a long way toward definitively documenting their trippy, ingenious maunderings.
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It's apparent that the album is to be understood as an exercise in collective memory, but it's unclear whether such an exercise is meant to include the band's fans, or if it's solely limited to the band itself.
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The songs blur into one another, edited to form a metal-machine grind of music that, while certainly exhausting--there’s even a disclaimer on the album: “Do not attempt to listen to all at once” -- maintains a kind of lurid appeal in its dogged attempts to capture a three-year journey within the constraints of a double LP.
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In the end, it's too erratic even by The Fiery Furnaces' standards to be a studio album, and utterly lacking the charm and character of the band's exhausting live show.
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Adeptly recorded both through the board and from the audience, Remember is a microcosm of the band's career--an ambitious mess.
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Superfluous, the extra weight drains the raw intensity of the Furnaces’ famed live show and often leaves Remember sounding like a cheaply recorded album, rather than a live celebration.
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The joy of watching them not fly off the rails made even the weaker shows worth hearing. But in turning that experience into a scrapbook, Remember kills the magic.