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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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Alternative PressDespite 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]
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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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The densely produced layers of previous works are gone in favor of a big and bright fun-house feel.
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BlenderThe album's an impossible mess, but so lively that it's worth sifting through the shrapnel for the tasty bits. [May 2006, p.106]
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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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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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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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Entertainment WeeklyAlternate[s] between childishly charming and plain irritating. [21 Apr 2006, p.73]
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FilterFor 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]
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MojoThe disc as a whole is never quite as gripping as its conceptual predecessors. [Jun 2006, p.112]
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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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Two-thirds of the songs fail to cohere.
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Paste MagazineA record less overtly conceptual than its predecessors but no less challenging and rewarding. [Jun/Jul 2006, p.114]
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This is not by any stretch a turn toward the accessible, though there are a few great pop moments.
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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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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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Q MagazineAlas, 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]
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The Furnaces refuse to play it commonplace... which is both their greatest strength and most frustrating weakness.
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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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SpinBrilliantly unhinged rock spiked with R&B and power pop. [Jun 2006, p.80]
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Bitter Tea is probably my favorite Fiery Furnaces album to date, but it isn’t without snags.
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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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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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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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Really, the only downfall of Bitter Tea is that it reeks of a transitional album.
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UncutClever-clever, emotional-emotional avant-pop. [Jun 2006, p.100]
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Under The RadarBitter 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]
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UrbEven listeners who retreat to the "experimental" defense will only mixtape the five decent tracks and torch the rest. [May 2006, p.84]
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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.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 44 out of 52
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Mixed: 4 out of 52
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Negative: 4 out of 52
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PaulJSep 7, 2006
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DrGoobJun 9, 2006
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JohnDMay 20, 2006