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Damn. Looks like we lost power again. Happens pretty often here, especially on the hottest days. System overloads cause brief glitches and outages, draining the power we take for granted from our appliances and modern devices. Unsaved data is lost, the fan stops circulating the air. And when normalcy resumes, the clocks come back confused, blurting "noon" at intervals until reset. As strong as we like to think our technologically advanced society is, it's telling that the electricity and power that we rely on daily are brought to us by an exceptionally fragile network, vulnerable to malfunction at millions of points.

Art has long been the mirror to society, from the physical and philosophical ideals suggested by Greek statuary, to Picasso's cubist deconstructions of wartime massacres and Hendrix dismantling "The Star-Spangled Banner" to simultaneously explore his patriotism and his disgust with the Vietnam War. So, as we as a society become more reliant on technology to aid us and remember the details of our lives for us, it seems logical that music-- perhaps the most immediate and cathartic art form available-- should explore the intricacies of our relationship with technology. It also bears noting that music, a capella singing notwithstanding, is a technological art form, relying on the inventions of human hands to produce and capture it.

In their unfortunately brief time together, Chicago's the Fire Show were more than willing to explore the possibilities and limitations of the equipment they had to work with, often exploiting its limitations in the service of expression. Last year's mini-album Above the Volcano of Flowers came across as something of a mission statement-- the mission being simply to move forward and create something genuinely original and affecting, a feat the band seemed utterly prepared to accomplish.

And with their swan song, Saint the Fire Show, they do. The album is a dark, unpredictable maelstrom of ideas, emotion and haywire technology, at times disquietingly calm and at others in danger of running completely off the rails. The band opens the album in a strange place with the crippled hymn "The Making of Dead Hollow," and for some, its intense strangeness may be somewhat offputting. But I suspect that it's for this very reason that the band sequenced it this way-- that perhaps it's a means of weeding out the faint of heart before they've invested too much. Here's how it unfolds:

M Resplendent's mournful falsetto hangs in empty air, untouched and natural. It moves in simple, drifting phrases, never wavering or faltering, as sampling, peculiar noises and oddball musical passages crop up alongside it. A clanging drum beat, a vicious guitar, reprocessed vocals and soundtrack strings all threaten Resplendent's moody vocalizing, but nothing really takes a swing until a full-band rhythm rises at the song's end for an instrumental coda.

The rest of Saint the Fire Show is hardly as weird, but no less inventive. "The Rabbit of My Soul Is the King of His Ghost," one of several outstanding tracks on the record, kicks in with harmonized guitars before dropping a colossal groove, funked up by Pyx Klos' rubbery bass. Resplendent sing-speaks his way through the post-punk landscape as Olias Nil injects layered backing vocals and heavy-echo tape effects. "Dollar and Cent Supplicants" is eerie and arctic, with chilly pianos swimming through frigid oceans of reverb. Sampled operatic interjections aside, the song is utterly skeletal, and as such it's the most piercing thing here, Resplendent's voice crawling up your spine to whisper, processed, into your ear.

"The God Forsaken Angels of Epistemology" creeps in on a bed of fuzz and heavily compressed drums. The strings return here as well, pumping necessary organic sounds into the electronic stew. Resplendent's delivery on the chorus is so perfect, it's easy to miss that the only thing backing him up is the percussion. But Saint the Fire Show is the kind of album where the details sneak up on you like that-- most of it is so perfectly layered that it tricks you into thinking there's more going on than there actually is.

For instance, "Useless Romo Cravings" never places more than four instruments behind the vocal at one time, yet the way it's recorded gives the impression of intricate overdubbing, the sound washing inland like the first break of a tsunami crashing through a coastal metropolis. The joint production work of Graeme Gibson and Brian Deck is stunning as well-- the duo focuses on injecting space into the dense mix, and as a result, the bass still seems to float, even when weighed down by overdriven cymbals and piles of keyboards.

The closing dirge "You are My Sunshine" (yes, that one) uses a scarcity of sounds to elevate itself from an ironic cover into something genuinely desolate and despairing. I'm absolutely positive that, while writers Jimmie Davis and Charles Mitchell certainly didn't intend the song as some kind of joyous celebration of humanity, they never meant for the song to sound quite this desolate. The Fire Show focus on the plea of the line, "Please don't take my sunshine away," spinning it into a visceral anguish, with the album's final embers burning out slowly as a wrecked trombone enters to sweep aside the catharsis.

And that's right around the time that you realize this is the last you'll ever hear from the Fire Show. The individual members will likely move on to other things, but it's an absolute shame these guys won't be operating as a unit again, because, in simple terms, they were tremendous. Two brief documentary segments are included on this disc for your enlightenment, though they offer no insight into the band's decision to call it quits. But there is one small comfort: at least this band left us their masterpiece before they departed.

-Joe Tangari, August 7th, 2002