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Bitter Tea
EMAILPRINTby The Fiery Furnaces

Generally favorable reviews
Based on 30 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 50 votes
Read user comments
Rate this album >
Album Info
Label: Fat Possum
Release Date: 18 April 2006
Discs: 1 disc
Genre(s): Indie, Rock
Summary
The increasingly prolific brother-sister duo of Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger (this time, sans grandmother) return with their fourth album.
Also By This Artist: Blueberry Boat Gallowsbird's Bark I'm Going Away Rehearsing My Choir Remember [Live] Widow City
Also On Metacritic
MUSIC: Matthew Friedberger: Winter Women / Holy Ghost Language School
Also On The Web: Official Artist Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Alternative Press
Despite the oddball showpieces, the Furnaces have refocused the lens on their homemade-pop kaleidoscope, and the result is a unversally resonant album that's not just more joyful than it's companion; it's also more essential. [Jul 2006, p.192]
cokemachineglow
Bitter Tea has a bevy or unexplained items - crazy cranes, bloodthirsty in-laws, traitors lying in grass, osmanthus blossoms, card cheats and the only pewter pocket watch that belong to Joseph Smith's Great-Great Uncle's brother in law. It's outlandish stuff, and requires suitably outlandish music, from its weird melodies to jarring segues to an ocean of sounds marking a transition from one verse to the next.
Read Full Review >Under The Radar
Bitter Tea is nearly abstract to a fault, but that doesn't always take away from its finest moments, which are in abundance. [#13, p.85]
Tiny Mix Tapes
Really, the only downfall of Bitter Tea is that it reeks of a transitional album.
Read Full Review >The New York Times
Nothing about this dense, jumbled, energetic, totally inorganic, quite brilliant word- and note-stuffed album is to the point. [17 Apr 2006]
Read Full Review >All Music Guide
Anyone who enjoyed having their brains and ears rearranged by Blueberry Boat and Rehearsing My Choir should find Bitter Tea enjoyable, but at this point, it seems like the most challenging thing the Fiery Furnaces could do is trust their pop instincts a little more often.
Read Full Review >Uncut
Clever-clever, emotional-emotional avant-pop. [Jun 2006, p.100]
Spin
Brilliantly unhinged rock spiked with R&B and power pop. [Jun 2006, p.80]
The Guardian
Despite the mismatches of mood and style, wistfulness accumulates throughout this album's 72 minutes; there's an intriguing inwardness at the heart of this most cultish of bands.
Read Full Review >Paste Magazine
A record less overtly conceptual than its predecessors but no less challenging and rewarding. [Jun/Jul 2006, p.114]
Pitchfork
This is not by any stretch a turn toward the accessible, though there are a few great pop moments.
Read Full Review >Stylus Magazine
Bitter Tea is probably my favorite Fiery Furnaces album to date, but it isn’t without snags.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club)
What initially sounds like randomly spliced bits of third-generation new-wave mix-tapes gets more intriguing with each listen, largely because beneath the air of general weirdness, there's a perverse pop sensibility.
Read Full Review >ShakingThrough.net
The Furnaces refuse to play it commonplace... which is both their greatest strength and most frustrating weakness.
Read Full Review >Billboard
The densely produced layers of previous works are gone in favor of a big and bright fun-house feel.
Read Full Review >PopMatters
It’s true that they could probably benefit from a stricter censorship of their own endless creativity, but Bitter Tea is an uncontrolled outpouring of musical concepts in every way, and you sense that the Friedbergers wanted this.
Read Full Review >Village Voice
It's a unique and occasionally maddening formula, but what makes this supremely rinky-dink fourth-grade-production-of–Pirates of Penzance racket captivating is the unflappable way they sell all this circuitous dream logic, instead of just reverting to uncaring, insufferable twee.
Read Full Review >Neumu.net
Bitter Tea offers immediacy, but little reward for return visits; offers vastness -- at a dawdling 73 minutes -- but nothing in the way of big ideas.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly
Alternate[s] between childishly charming and plain irritating. [21 Apr 2006, p.73]
Blender
The album's an impossible mess, but so lively that it's worth sifting through the shrapnel for the tasty bits. [May 2006, p.106]
Drowned In Sound
There's something impenetrable about it, an obtuse level of abstraction and a slightly joyless delivery that really leaves this listener with no point of entry at times.
Read Full Review >Prefix Magazine
The album's true stumbling block lies in the Friedbergers' inability to follow many of their ideas to any sort of logical conclusion.
Read Full Review >Mojo
The disc as a whole is never quite as gripping as its conceptual predecessors. [Jun 2006, p.112]
Filter
For every minute-long section of pinwheeling brilliance, there is some expository musical element that keeps us from getting at the core of what makes the group work so well. [#20, p.99]
Dot Music
As the title suggests, this album is - deliberately, you feel - a thwarted pleasure, any sweetness and warmth being spiked with discordance and bitterness.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle
Anyone turned off by last year's octogenarian opera Rehearsing My Choir, recorded at the same time as Bitter Tea, will find little solace here.
Read Full Review >Q Magazine
Alas, from [the first two tracks]... the pair slip first into mediocrity and then the standbys of those who have run out of inspiration: backwards recording and pointless noodling. [Jun 2006, p.115]
Urb
Even listeners who retreat to the "experimental" defense will only mixtape the five decent tracks and torch the rest. [May 2006, p.84]
Slant Magazine
Less a rebound from the indulgent for-friends-and-family-only nightmare of Rehearsing My Choir than a lateral side-step, Bitter Tea sounds like a desperate plea to be labeled as "clever."
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this album is 8.8 (out of 10) based on 50 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Paul J gave it a10:
Chewy and innovative musicianship combines with intelligent, thoughtful lyricism, to take your hand in theirs for a trip (in all good senses) into a private parallel world which provides much-needed disengagment therapy from the careworn workaday world. A musical highspot for 2006
DrGoob gave it a10:
Holy shit, The Fiery Furnaces did it again. It's absurd, pretentious and outrageously self-indulgent, and yet it's brilliant. They make every album released since their last one look tame and conventional. Again. They are the 21st century successors to legends like Beefheart and Zappa.
John D gave it an8:
Let's face it: every Fiery Furnaces album sounds terrible the first time you listen to it. After the first couple of times, it grows on you. (Except for 'Rehearsing', which everybody except Spin Magazine hated, but then again, they gave 'Registration' a B+ in its formal review and then proceeded to name it ALBUM OF THE YEAR, which is just stupid.) Don't put this on when you can't give 91% of your cencentration to the music.
Dave R gave it a3:
It's like listening to the grandiose, wild experimentation of Blueberry Boat without the sweeping melodies and brilliant 'pop' moments. They've developed a completely unique and personal sound but without a more grounded core these songs mostly become an exercise in pushing boundaries, so if that's your cup of 'tea' then go for it.
mikey s gave it a10:
forget what the critics are saying. This CD is taking music in a new direction, and it's a fantastic production.
Stu B gave it a9:
why are these critics bothering with trying to critique this? get a grip! this albums ridiculous and absurd and the kids will love it !
Benjamin Bunny gave it a9:
Bitter Tea. This album takes a lot of time to get into, but you'll find that you'll probably find well spent--Bitter Tea is an enticing puzzle, and as you fit the pieces together, the joy/enjoyment deepends. Soon enough you may find that it is in fact your favorite Fiery Furneces album...well I should give that more time, but I've had "Benton Harbor Blues," "Teach Me Sweetheart" and "Waiting To Know You" on mostly endless repeat for the last week. I haven't been this obsessed with an album since Fiona Apple's "Extraordinary Machine."
