Ezra Furman - Perpetual Motion People
9/10
‘Never classify me; don’t try’. It’s good advice to take from the Chicagoan because a fool is the person who tries to nail down quite where this, the third album from Ezra Furman, falls in the musical landscape. Track by track his sound shapes itself in a loopy completeness before exploding into something immaterial and reforming as something you never expected, like a hyperactive Autobot going through a profound existential crisis. Between fluttering woodwind and a whole load of ‘ditty bop sha lang lang’ Furman tackles gender and identity, the political, the personal and the social, all of it with agile language and an unsettling playfulness - the excellent Ordinary Life and its chirp of ‘One September in Boston / I lost the will to live’ will smack you in the brainhole with its tonal contradictions. Wobbly, Pot-Holes and Lousy Connection all get honourable mentions but it’s hard to pick from an album that delivers at each sparkling turn. Grab your shoes and party through the hard times like never before.
9/10
