It's New to Me: Banging Down the Doors by Ezra Furman & the Harpoons (2007)

Poster titled On vous intoxique! by Ecole nationale superieure des arts decoratifs, 1969

I've been struggling coming up with things to write about lately - I decided today to write about this Ezra Furman CD I bought at a gig last week. It's called Banging Down the Doors, and I believe it was his band's first major full-length release. When it came out in 2007, Furman was about 20, but he impressed people immediately as a songwriter. As I mentioned in my review of his recent live performance, he doesn't go out of his way to avoid comparisons to big-name songwriter types like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. His squawking voice and emphatic singing style also says "I'm a songwriter who sings - not vice versa" - on Banging Down the Doors he sounds almost exactly like the Violent Femmes' Gordon Gano, to give you an indication of what level of adenoidal whine we're talking about (9.5/10 on the Darnielle Scale of Nasal Singing).

It's easy to see why people took Furman seriously right from the start - Banging Down the Doors is an impressive collection of songs executed with a great degree of confidence. It takes guts to place songs called "I Wanna Be a Sheep" and "I Wanna Be Ignored" back to back in a tracklist, but Furman knows what he's doing. The former song is the album's gentlest track - it delivers a seemingly obvious metaphor about wolves and sheep with a surprising degree of skill, and the latter song is a blistering and straight-forward rocker that addresses the listener directly with lines like, "I want you to enjoy the music without thinking about what the lyrics mean." He pulls this trick again to humorous effect on "The Little Red-Haired Girl", singing, "It's just our first record - I want you to fall in love with me!" He can get away with lines like this because he knows how to use his youth and precociousness to his advantage.

This is also true to some extent on Banging Down the Doors' more ambitious songs - "I Dreamed of Moses" works well because it's grounded in humor, but Furman pushes his luck with "God is a Middle-Aged Woman" and comes off sounding a little too big for his britches. The best songs on the album are those that focus purely on delivering the Harpoons' combined package of unhinged energy, evocative personal lyrics, and a compelling (if borderline annoying) vocalist - the album's opener "Mother's Day" and closer "Lydia Sherman" do this well, as does "How Long, Diana?", a folk-pop number with a sea shanty vibe that has one of Furman's best chorus melodies. The only real weakness of Banging Down the Doors is that it is too unrelenting over its almost-one-hour run time - it can be too much all at once. More variety in the sounds and better sequencing is the answer to this, and Furman did better on the follow-up to this album, 2008's exceptional Inside the Human Body.

"How Long, Diana?" by Ezra Furman & the Harpoons