Furniture Music For Evening Shuttles

On their fourth album, New York’s Tower Recordings found their way. If previous albums had them exploring particular fascinations (acid folk on Fraternity of Moonwalkers; group sound on Let the Cosmos Ring), Furniture Music had them combining everything effortlessly, and reaching out yet further, to take in Tropicalia — see their humid, dainty cover of Os Mutantes’ “O Relógio,” retitled “Q Delmak-O,” which dissolves into a ‘say love’ chant, sampling free jazz musician Brother Ah; from there, “The Nine Billion Names of God” is pure psych-folk worship, a buzzsaw guitar cutting through the medieval melancholy. As the album develops, things get hazier, woozier, as though the collective are beaming in their songs and improvisations from a fugged-out, blurry television set. They’d go on to make better albums, but Furniture Music is a great snapshot of everything Tower Recordings could do.