The Fiery Furnaces made two wildly unpredictable but totally engaging CDs that messed with time, rhyme, and melody (more often than not in the same song). The brother/sister duo of Matt and Eleanor Friedberger weirds out even more on their latest record, Rehearsing My Choir. It’s a concept album about their 83-year-old grandmother. And unlike most concept records, which tend to be incoherent, Choir is pretty much a straightforward narrative account of Grandma’s childhood recollections, set to everything from embryonic piano-plunking (“Forty-Eight Twenty-Three Twenty-Second Street”) to ersatz baroque (“Seven Silver Curses”). The Furnaces are also test-driving some brand new material — from the upcoming Bitter Tea — as well as tossing in several nuggets from their first two records. Be sure to get there early for the opener, Sybris, a quartet that makes a lot of noise on its self-titled debut. Like fellow Chicagoans the Smashing Pumpkins, the members of Sybris adore distorted guitars and songs that slowly build to tuneful dissonance.
Tue., Feb. 28, 9 p.m.
This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2006.