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100

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.

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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.

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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]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Stylus Magazine

Bitter Tea is probably my favorite Fiery Furnaces album to date, but it isn’t without snags.

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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.

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ShakingThrough.net

The Furnaces refuse to play it commonplace... which is both their greatest strength and most frustrating weakness.

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Billboard

The densely produced layers of previous works are gone in favor of a big and bright fun-house feel.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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]

NOW Magazine

Two-thirds of the songs fail to cohere.

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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."

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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."

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