How can this be music?

Let me tell you something about the Fiery Furnaces: they're really creative and have the potential to write genre-inventing, era-defining music if they would just slow the hell down. Their hooks are phenomenal; their ear for instrumentation (and the wide variety of instruments they use effectively) is impressive. They just don't seem to have enough confidence in their melodies, because they abandon them just about every 30 seconds.\nLast year's Blueberry Boat was the musical equivalent of taking 300 delicious gourmet meals of every type of cuisine and then mashing them together in a bucket with a toilet plunger. This year's self-titled EP was decidedly better, but it still contained pipe-bomb tracks that would start out great and then explode into incoherent, super-affected wackiness. If you want to confuse and annoy your listener, it's a great tactic.\nNow, of course, they've topped themselves. They've put out Rehearsing My Choir, a concept album in which an old lady with a horribly warbled voice tells you the story of her life. This, of course, is tracked over their loopy, lopsided musical schizophrenia. It's just about the most self-indulgent thing I've ever heard -- the only reason this album has a passing grade is that when the actual band members sing, it's great.\n"The Garfield El" opens with a harpsichord and immediately showcases the annoying woman's voice that's going to haunt you like a vindictive troll throughout the entirety. When Eleanor Friedberger sings, it sounds melodic and inviting. When the old woman blathers over the steady crescendo of the music, it's like riding on a canted merry-go-round in a nightmare subway station on Planet Obnoxious Old Person. The harpsichord noodling does not vary or stop for the first two-and-a-half minutes.\n"The Wayward Granddaughter" is quite pleasing at first because of its steady dance beat, freaky synths and decided lack of the old lady for about 140 seconds. Then, of course, Eleanor seems to be having a conversation with the woman, the kind of conversation you would have with a crazy old person who lived in a box with sixteen cats. It's not a bad song -- though it features the same stupid incoherent melodic shifts, it's still decent. It's followed by "A Candymaker's Knife in My Handbag," another great song completely ruined.\nI'm not going to run through this album track-by-track. It's the same eccentric pop meltdown that Fiery Furnaces fans would expect. Pretty much every track, however, features the woman telling her life story, her voice as soothing as a broken glass enema. You could take this album and say "it's not for everyone," but I'm struggling to find whom it's actually for. Ardent fans? Gerophiles? Masochists? Your guess is as good as mine.\nI'm all for creativity, exploration and challenges in music. Sometimes music has to be taken in context, which is a notion I can appreciate. However, this album is a nightmare -- it's an overcooked, masturbatory experiment in how much this band can bait and switch its fans with pretense and frustration. Some people will undoubtedly fawn over it, but if you listen to music for reasons other than hurting your ears, you probably won't.