Pitchfork

This song follows the Furnaces' lyrical template of, "I went (somewhere) with (something) in (someplace deceptively mundane) beside (someone curious)." Conceivably, this is the story of a bitter, frustrated housewife, maybe out of one of the early 1970s ladies magazines the Friedbergers referenced in the lyric-writing stage. From stalking through the suburban "duplexes of the dead," or suffering a sexless honeymoon with her husband, the narrator is taunted by a "magic word, seldom said but often heard" that is denied her until the end, when she gets in a fight with the chlorine fumes from a swimming pool. I'm guessing it's about orgasms.

The Furnaces' next full-length, Widow City, is Blueberry Boat with an attention span: the best songs, like "Duplexes of the Dead", pair brief lyrics to hard music, and Matt Friedberger tones down the twitteriness and pulls classic rock string sounds from his Chamberlin. Not to mention that on Boat, this and the next two songs would have been jammed into one track about the frustrated narrator's journey, but here, they're separated into three sharp, satisfying cuts. Us critics call that "maturity."