Fond of renaming his backing band, Chicagoan rock’n’roller Ezra Furman says goodbye to the Boy-Friends and greets the Visions for his fourth solo album. The rebrand hints at the richness of imagination in Transangelic Exodus, in which Furman and his celestial lover go on the run from an oppressive government in an adrenaline-jolted, allegorically angry “queer outlaw saga”, a dark, fantastic road story reminiscent of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart or the classic comic Preacher. Furman’s songwriting is invigorated by a headlong rush of narrative, exploring episodic shifts of tone along the way.
The core of his irresistible tunes is still raw, retro rock’n’roll: Love You So Bad’s Lou Reed-style girl-group backing vocals – Furman is currently finishing a book on Transformer – garnish tense, low string stabs, exultant energy waiting to burst out. But Transangelic Exodus also has a contemporary, dirty, digitally degraded sheen – “how can you listen to Yeezus and then want to make an early rock’n’roll record?” he recently asked – on the likes of Driving Down to LA, with its serrated crunches of noise, or the twisted textures of you-and-me-against-the-world opener Suck the Blood From My Wound, in which Springsteenian escape meets tech paranoia: “They’ll never find us if we turn off our phones/ We’re off the grid, we’re off our meds, we’re finally out on our own.”
