Like a lost synth-prog opera, a forgotten cosmology laced in rock and roll, this extremely theatrical second album from Brooklyn's Flaming Fire very nearly defies description, let alone those facile "sounds like X crossed with Y" comparisons.
Songs from the Shining Temple is like watching Billy Graham with the sound off, Black Sabbath blasting in the background. It's like experiencing your purest visions of heaven and hell while attending Sunday school wasted on glue. It's the definitive record for anyone who has put away a childhood's worth of fire and brimstone in some distant, inaccessible portion of his brain, only have it pop up at odd moments of apocalyptic dread. It's pretty strange stuff.
Flaming Fire is a loosely organized collective revolving around Patrick Hambrecht, the band's visionary guitarist and songwriter. Other key members include Hambrecht's wife Kate, who sings and plays drums, Lauren Weinstein, who also sings, guitarist "Jonny A." Ackerman and bassist John Mathias. Together they make a crazy beautiful tapestry of sounds and ideas, melding drum-machine synthetics and sweet female harmonies with demonic howls.
"The Way You Kill Me (Blood Does Shine)", for instance, starts with a new wave manufactured drumbeat, then lays on Kate's (or Lauren's) deadpan sexy drawl. The "Set the World on Fire" chorus veers metal-operatic, then it's back to that bare beat, as the vocals grow more and more frantic. From the second chorus on, you feel that it can't get any more intense -- and surprise surprise, it doesn't. An electric buzz of guitars gives way to surpassingly gentle lullaby tones, murmuring about blood and tears and waking from life. "Fire of Love", which follows, also builds on the drum machine, putting a syncopated montage of female gasps and yelps over the beat. All crashing cacophony, screams and nerve-wracking rhythms, it's a peek into the mouth of hell, full of snarling dogs and smoking fumes.
"Kill the Right People" showcases the band's bizarre sense of humor, blending roadhouse piano with banjo and death metal growls in a happy, up-with-people celebration of sex and mayhem. "Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, falling down", goes the sing-along chorus, and you can almost hear the singer smiling. Then it's back to synth territory, with the creepy happy Human League vibe of "Your Love Belongs to Me".
Other highlights include the tribally intense "Gun Through a Razor", the lost go-go version of an Indian rain dance, and "Cut the Reaper", a psycho-punk funeral song where the bell tolls for death itself. "There is a Sky" layers voices one on top of the other in a speed-addled consideration of Platonic idealism ("There is a sky that's bigger than the other sky / There is a high that's bigger than the other high.").
Songs from the Shining Temple is a brilliant piece of work all by itself. Still, just listening feels like half the story. It's like the score to the freakiest underground movie you ever saw, or the songs from a musical written at a camp for high-functioning schizophreniacs. It's so theatrical that you can't help picturing the songs performed, acted out somehow, with dancing and costumes and characters. (By all accounts, Flaming Fire delivers all that in its live concerts, performing its very kinetic show in red togas.) It's also something you (or at least I) have to enjoy without fully understanding it. There's clearly a twisted philosophy at work here, but what it is and how it works is never made completely explicit.
If you like music that reaches for something more, if you're not afraid of a little weirdness and if you long for answers to the deep questions, Songs from the Shining Temple is your kind of record. For all the rest of you, let me just say this: Sinners repent lest you be consumed by Flaming Fire.
