Ezra Furman - Twelve Nudes

The Guardian 80

(Bella Union)
Furman continues to renege on his retirement with a gloriously angry punk album that takes aim at his broken homeland

When Ezra Furman released Day of the Dog in 2013, it was a last throw of the dice before giving up music. The ecstatic reaction to that album didn’t just convince him to continue, it stoked his ambition on the two albums that followed, Perpetual Motion People and Transangelic Exodus, the latter of which was as confounding as it was brilliant. Twelve Nudes, which is almost entirely a punk rock album (only I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend harks back to doo-wop and rock’n’roll), might sound like a step back, but really it is tightly focused on one aspect of his writing: despair.

Pitchfork 71

The songwriter’s most direct and brash album yet has no time for saxophones or keyboards. She gives specific, unpoetic examples and doesn’t mince words.

The Guardian 60

(Bella Union)

“I wanted nothing more than to open up and bleed” sings Ezra Furman on Calm Down AKA I Should Not Be Alone, the track that opens his fifth solo album. Well, mission accomplished: he’s spraying the claret around liberally here, dropping the strong narrative drive of his last collection, Transangelic Exodus (a “queer outlaw saga” about a man who falls in love with an angel and has to flee from the oppressive government), in favour of red-raw punk frankness. Twelve Nudes veers madly through distorted, ragged-throated, urgent punk rock, like Jonathan Richman being slowly dissolved in acid, with sludge-metal flourishes on Trauma and a Dead Kennedys-ish stomp on Rated R Crusaders.

Just as engaging is Furman’s bracing self-analysis: on Evening Prayer AKA Justice he berates himself for his complacent 20s: “I was rolling over for wealth and power/As if they really cared about me”. On the sweet change of pace of I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend, a sousedly sentimental ballad, meanwhile, he muses: “My responsible friends are applying for jobs/But me I was considering ditching Ezra and going by Esme”. At 11 songs (yes, the title is a trick) and just over 25 minutes, it all makes for a short, sharp, exhilarating blast, closing with the question we’re all asking as things fall apart: What Can You Do But Rock’n’Roll?