FUR - 'Brother'
Mournful Melancholy: Brighton indie outfit Fur deal out beautiful sorrow with latest single ‘Brother’
If there’s thing I know of the band Fur, it’s their ability to craft a melody. It's ever present across much of their six-year discography. Spanning their singles, EP’s and two albums to date, they have crafted a sound all their own, setting themselves apart from the tens (possibly hundreds) of other indie rock bands emerging in British guitar music at that time. While I certainly noticed a clear Strokes heritage worn proudly on their sleeves when I first started listening to them (the same could very well be said for most guitar bands post ‘Is This It’), there’s less of that seminal garage/punk aesthetic present, and instead you have Fur pulling from and setting to their own tastes many broad ranges of musical style and influence. Their debut, ‘Facing Home Mixtape’, seems to me a deftly handled and insultingly catchy indie-rock effort, drawing from the distant, sunbaked surf rock idiosyncrasies of The Beach Boys, with healthy doses of Arctic Monkeys ‘AM’ melody and Last Shadow Puppets balladry. If you haven’t listened to any of it yet, ’Existential Crisis in G Major’, ‘Waiting on You (Coming Back Home)’ and ‘You’ showcase this blend quite tastefully. And then you have ‘17 to 8’, a driving indie ballad reminiscent of early Turin Brakes, but somehow even more full of melody and head swinging rhythm. And likewise, you have much of same sonic experimentation in their sophomore release ‘When You Walk Away’, but at double the length of their debut and with a much more textured sonic range, Fur was very much in the ascent of their musical journey.
And it seems they still are. In their most recent contribution, we find the three-piece wandering, hearts-heavy, down much more sorrowful roads. And out of these wanderings the band have fashioned for themselves ‘Brother’, a stripped back, barebones track preceding their forthcoming album to be released later this year. It’s a track heavy with as much hurt as beauty, and dense in a haunted vulnerability.
The song, top to bottom, is composed of softly strummed guitar and tender, dreary vocals courtesy of frontman Will Murray. Comprising of nothing more than four chords in the verses, with some change in the pre-chorus to allow the track some added melody, and rounded off with desolate, reverb-heavy vocalisations at its end, the track allows you to glimpse the broken heart at its centre. The guitar pairs up with Murray’s sombre vocals, allowing an easy entrance into the subject matter the track deals with. Murray and the band conceived of ‘Brother’ as an ode to loss, of friendship turned family, suddenly removed. And in its absence, the pain and heartbreak left to fill the spaces. In terms of vocals sung, the song is torn between that familial bond formed, of “you and I, we know all there is to know, about one another, like we’re sister and brother”, and in the wake of this fully snatched away, the desire to “hold the line, to see you on last time, why’d you have to go, maybe that’s for you to know". The track taps into that essential human despair of losing someone, after having forged a relationship so sturdy and real, only to then ponder the reasons for its very happening. And in that pondering, the sullen conclusion that you’ll never fully understand the reasons for it happening. Will Murray’s eventual relocation to Australia after the release of their third album is quite possibly the emotional genesis of this track, and if this is indeed the case, then ‘Brother’ is a bittersweet moment of foreshadowing before their album drops.
In a modern musical landscape so fixated on dense production values, rich instrumentation and expansive soundscapes, ‘Brother’ is a reminder that even the most simply constructed songs can offer the same amount of poignancy. While I don’t imagine ‘Brother’ will capture the greater essence of Fur’s upcoming release given their consistently instrumentally complex outputs in years previous, if this is to precede Fur’s last album release before Murray’s move to distant territories, then it undoubtedly captures the soul of a band held together by a steel-strong bond over music. It’s a song that will move you on a personal level precisely because it draws on that very human battle with loss, and on that alone ‘Brother’ should warrant your attention. Their forthcoming album drops later this year, so keep your ears ready.
Words by Harry Meenagh
