Ezra Furman appears to be in a constant state of escape. Her brand of soulful punk rock could be described as road music, with lyrics largely preoccupied with finding respite from a hostile world. As a Jewish trans woman, her resistance to oppression manifests as flight, mostly in the company of a partner, with love in private being the antidote to hate in public. On her sixth album, All of Us Flames, Furman follows this motif to its natural conclusion, illustrating how, in addition to self-love, building close connections with others can shield marginalized people from the splintering effects of bigotry and loneliness.
Narratively, All of Us Flames begins at an aerial view and gradually homes in on Furman’s own stories and experiences. She fills much of the album’s front half with world-building, and her view is markedly apocalyptic, with poisoned water running through cursed cities in the opening call to arms, “Train Comes Through.” A particularly salient recurring image is the contrast between black, a color of mourning, and lilac, which seemingly stands in for the queer-coded color lavender. The pop-soul-tinged “Dressed in Black” focuses on mourning, with Furman’s haunted lover looking longingly at a “world that never cared at all for us.”
Being Jewish after the Holocaust and queer after the AIDS crisis means living with a recent memory of mass cruelty and loss, so while Furman frames her love as an act of resistance, it’s apparent that her triumph is the exception, not the norm across All of Us Flames. Even on the album’s upbeat and thrumming “Lilac and Black,” which occupies a similar gray area between art pop and heartland rock to Sharon Van Etten’s recent work, she sings, “We might smile and laugh in a photograph/But you know our pretty heads are haunted.”
Even the more directly faith-based songs on All of Us Flames are in conversation with Furman’s gender identity. “Book of Our Names,” for instance, draws inspiration from the Book of Exodus, which offers a list of the names of the newly emancipated Israelites as an assertion of their humanity. But knowing the significance of names to trans people and the humanizing, affirming effects of simply saying their names, the declaration that “the names will be the real ones that are ours/Not the ones given us by the enemy powers” resonates especially deeply. Likewise, on “Poor Girl a Long Way from Heaven,” a noisy take on ’60s pop, she feminizes God, a lyrical move that likens Furman’s recognition of her own femininity to a miracle.
While All of Us Flames peaks in energy early with the tremendous “Forever in Sunset,” one of Furman’s most climactic rock songs since 2018’s “Driving Down to L.A.,” the impact of the album’s latter half comes from its focus on autobiographical minutiae. So while the album’s final stretch can feel uncharacteristically relaxed or even resigned for Furman, the doo-wop backing vocals, swooning synths, and muted volume all highlight the comfort she finds in feminine embodiment (“I Saw the Truth Undressing”), fantasies of the teenage girlhood she never got to fully experience (“Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club”), and queer love (“Come Close”). Even as she continues to honor collective loss on All of Us Flames, Furman celebrates the respite and redemption of forging a radically independent path.
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