Bitter Tea

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.

Nothing about this dense, jumbled, energetic, totally inorganic, quite brilliant word- and note-stuffed album is to the point. [17 Apr 2006]

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.

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]

Really, the only downfall of Bitter Tea is that it reeks of a transitional album.

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.

Clever-clever, emotional-emotional avant-pop. [Jun 2006, p.100]

Brilliantly unhinged rock spiked with R&B and power pop. [Jun 2006, p.80]

A record less overtly conceptual than its predecessors but no less challenging and rewarding. [Jun/Jul 2006, p.114]

This is not by any stretch a turn toward the accessible, though there are a few great pop moments.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Alternate[s] between childishly charming and plain irritating. [21 Apr 2006, p.73]

The album's true stumbling block lies in the Friedbergers' inability to follow many of their ideas to any sort of logical conclusion.

The disc as a whole is never quite as gripping as its conceptual predecessors. [Jun 2006, p.112]

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]

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.

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]

As the title suggests, this album is - deliberately, you feel - a thwarted pleasure, any sweetness and warmth being spiked with discordance and bitterness.

Even listeners who retreat to the "experimental" defense will only mixtape the five decent tracks and torch the rest. [May 2006, p.84]

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]

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.

Two-thirds of the songs fail to cohere.