As it happens, I got on the phone with Ezra Furman just a few days after watching Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water, the fantastical story of a biology lab custodian in the 1960s and her mission to help a humanoid aquatic creature escape from government agents. Furman, who’s spent the majority of his dozen years in music trading in revivalist rock n' roll, has taken a sharp turn with his new album, a foray into layered, baroque pop melodrama called Transangelic Exodus, which he's described as a “queer outlaw saga.” Its loose narrative: “I’m in love with an angel, and a government is after us, and we have to leave home because angels are illegal, as is harboring angels.”
That a Mexican filmmaker and a punk-minded musician from Chicago might both feel compelled to create work about vilified, vulnerable “others” and efforts to save them from a state hell-bent on their extermination says a lot about the times we’re in. And while the advent of Trump’s America certainly fueled Furman’s creative juices, his alliance with the disenfranchised and the powerless that is woven throughout Transangelic Exodus has many sources and isn’t new. But it’s never been more explicit than on passionately felt new songs like the tense “No Place,” the Moldy Peaches-conjuring anti-folk of “Peel My Orange Every Morning,” the panicked, siege mentality of “Come Here Get Away From Me,” and the rousing, on-the-run opener “Suck the Blood From My Wound,” on which Furman sings what could be the album’s thesis: “To them, you know we’ll always be freaks.”