Ezra Furman destroys the world with searing new album ‘All of Us Flames’
Ezra Furman is speaking to you through a car stereo. As synth pads slide under electronica-tinged beats and jangling acoustic guitars, her vocals reach out of their stereophonic cage and begin whispering strange tales of young love. This is ‘Train Comes Through’, the first track from Furman’s new album All Of Us Flames, out on August 26th.
As the album-opener unfolds, it’s hard not to feel a wave of teen-movie euphoria enveloping you, the same nostalgic joy that Furman felt in the chic propulsions of ’60s girl groups like The Shangri-Las and The Ronnettes, whose 1966 single ‘Dressed in Black’ became an important touchstone while writing the album. “I listened to ‘Dressed in Black’ by the Shangri-Las hundreds of times,” Furman confessed. “When I was writing, I read that Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las carried a gun in her purse on tour. There’s such violence to being a girl or a woman. It’s all gotta be cute, all the time, and also people are trying to kill you. And that’s life, the feminine life. Plus, young lovers just want to destroy the world.”
The world of All of Us Flames is off-balance, warped and carnivorous. In her own ‘Dressed in Black’, Furman sings of a pair of young lovers enraptured by the idea of escaping a world that doesn’t accept them, a world devastated by some mysterious apocalypse that leaves them hoarding supplies and fending off attackers with knives and guns. The apocalypse also provides the setting for the synth-basked ‘Forever in Sunset,’ which again casts young lovers as the saviours of a post ‘”crash” world knee-deep in a “winter of survival.”
Here, outcasts band together to build new societies based on self-preservation, love and hope. “We’ve been alone too long / We belong together with our weapons drawn,” Furman sings in ‘Lilac and Black,’ telling the story of a “queer girl gang” claiming the city of their oppressors for themselves “I started to think of trans women as a secret society across the world: scattered everywhere, but so obviously bound together, both in being vulnerable and having a shared vision to change a fundamental building block of patriarchal society,” Furman said of the track. “I’ve been building my world of queer pals, and it feels like we’re forming a gang.”
In this way, All of Us Flames is fundamentally utopian in outlook. And yet, Furman is not content to provide us with the end result alone. Instead, she shows us how persecution brings communities together. She shows us the weak and downtrodden uniting under a common cause, not to mention the bitter, frequently bloody uprisings that follow. She tells us that it isn’t enough to want a better world; we must be prepared to overturn everything – Old Testament style. “We don’t want the world as it was given to us. What do we want? What do you build in the space you cleared by fire?” Furman asks in ‘The Book of Names’. “After you purge all that is false, you have a positive yearning for what’s real.”
With All of Us Flames, Furman seeks to empower not only members of the trans community but everyone who has ever felt abused and exploited by those in power. It is a frankly dizzying piece of work that reveals Furman to be one of the most engaging and explorative songwriters working today.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out New Music Newsletter
All the latest New Music from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.