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All Of Us Flames
Ezra Furman
The new album, All Of Us Flames, by the wildly talented Ezra Furman is the culmination of a trilogy of work. The albums that came before this one, 2018’s Transangelic Exodus and 2019’s 12 Nudes, were both fully complete statements in their own right but here the Chicago based singer, songwriter and producer has made something that feels definitive about her own experience of finding and embracing a community, that maybe she didn’t know she needed.
All Of Us Flames, is a thoughtful and beautiful album. It paints a picture of being at the point in your life when, as she puts it, “You start to understand that you are not a lone wolf, but depend on finding your family, your people, how you work as part of a larger whole.” Throughout the running time of the album, even when Furman is at her most alone, you can sense this family, this community, forming itself around her and in turn, her finding her place in it.
Furman has such an amazing confident grasp with her songwriting. As a lyricist, she is second to none. Shades of Bowie, Dylan and Springsteen mix perfectly with the sounds of 60s girl groups and 80s anthemic rock. The quiet build of the opening track, “Train Comes Through” sets the tone perfectly. Her voice slightly builds up beneath the opening strains of a bubbling synth and before you know it her voice takes over, confident and unwavering. “Throne” is a fiery stomp with an unparalleled sense of urgency. Furman has said she listened to the Shangra-Las hunters of times when writing the album and it inspired her own song, named after their 1966 song, “Dressed In Black”. In the song Furman takes the style of the time and makes it her own. It’s brash and bold and pretty unforgettable. The centrepiece of the album, the beautifully gentle, amazingly named “Ally Sheedy In The Breakfast Club”, starts choppy and fragile as Furman tells a tale of “the teenage girl I never got to be”. The song showcases Furman’s grasp on storytelling, in the way that she can take something extremely personal and transcend those feelings into something universal.
All Of Us Flames is an album crafted by an artist who is able to take the things they feel and perfectly encapsulate them into song. It’s a rare gift for an artist to be able to do this so seemingly simply and it’s a gift that Furman has. The album is vulnerable, confident and beautiful. Something Furman created for herself and the communities of people that have been historically deprived of necessity and one that she has found herself building up around her, through her music, her work and her words.
Order by All Of Us Flames Ezra Furman HERE
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