Music Review: The Fiery Furnaces' Bitter Tea

The Fiery Furnaces have tossed out one the most spasmodic, inaccessible, flowing, and beautiful albums of 2006. Does that make sense? Well neither does this album. Yes, the Friedberger siblings titillate and tease their listeners by contrasting smooth synthesizer soundscapes with pure chaos on almost every track, kicking traditional little things like "transition" and "listenability" to the curb. The result brims with potential, yet ultimately leaves you hungry for more...evil geniuses, perhaps?

Bitter Tea is an amalgamation of synthesizers, guitars, and weird vocal effects whirling around a blender on low setting; each ingredient dominates at times, but the elements never truly mix. Most of these little sections work on their lonesome, but make no sense with the rest of the track. Perhaps the band wrote 20 or 30 songs, forgot they had a deadline, and just threw them all together until each track was three minutes long? The final result kind of sounds like those magnet sets with words that can be arranged to spell sentences on your refrigerator door. Except with music. And instead of words, the magnets say things like "jfiwkd", "owujdu", and "kweipoponjaks"....

Indeed, the most radio-friendly tracks are the bonus tracks "Nevers Again" and "Benton Harbor Blues Again", which (as you can see from the titles) are just cleaned up rehashes of earlier chaos-tracks on the album. But they are freakin BEAUTIFUL. Stereolab with more synthpop influence; melodic soundscaping at its best. Remember when I used the word titillate earlier? Hot damn! The band is clearly capable of making some great stuff, and it's a shame they chose not to for most of this album. These two tracks are the calm at the end of the storm...OR the eye of the hurricane (only if you play the cd twice and then like, skip them the second time). Eye of the tiger-hurricane? Whatever's more poetic.

All in all, this is a pretty good album. There are a lot of weird sounds in there, but they're good-weird. Maybe I'm just a sucker for space sounds, or maybe I like to feel all pretentious giving such a strange album a good review, maybe whatever. At the very least, kudos to the ballsy artists for making an album that is both euphony AND cacophony, my two favorite kind of phony (zing!). It's a fun listen.