DecoyMusic.com

• Website
• Hear
• Buy

Fiery Furnaces - Bitter Tea

Rating

RIYL

Flaming Lips
The Raveonettes
Mates of State

Tracklist

1. In My Little Thatched Hut
2. I'm in No Mood
3. Black-hearted Boy
4. Bitter Tea
5. Teach Me Sweetheart
6. Waiting to Know You
7. The Vietnamese Telephone Ministry
8. Oh Sweet Woods
9. Borneo
10. Police Sweater Blood Vow
11. Nevers
12. Benton Harbor Blues
13. Whistle Rhapsody?
14. Nevers (Reprise)
15. Benton Harbor Blues (Reprise)

Fresh off the heels of Rehearsing My Choir, the extremely atrocious, but respectable sophomore release, the Fiery Furnaces are back to their old game creating infectiously mutilated rock music. When they released Blueberry Boat, it was met to overwhelming critical acclaim, but mixed reactions from other listeners. Many hailed it as brilliant and that it breathed fresh air into a genre that was quickly becoming stale again, while others thought it was nothing but a mish-mash of noise and chamber pop and tried too hard to be weird. Bitter Tea is a direct sequel to Blueberry Boat in terms of sound, but it takes everything that was wrong with BB and fixes it. The biggest problem with BB was that each song was too long its own good, it was the same 30 seconds of music repeated over and over with little variation and each song was a song within a song; the album wasn’t very straight forward. The Fiery Furnaces get around these problems by instead making the album one very cohesive sound experience, with each song leading into the next and flowing very nicely.

The album has many different styles to it, with each song being different from the last but still encompassing some piece of the last song. The album is meant to be listened as a whole, as each song begins rather abruptly, but can still be listened in pieces. “In My Little Thatched Hut” is the opening track, starting with a growling synth line and Emily’s sultry voice quietly singing “In my little thatched hut, the green grass grows by the brook/ I lounge and I look, I lounge and I look” and quickly transforms into a series of tribal drums and explosive synths. It quickly becomes a chaotic song, and then calms down as everything stops and an acoustic guitar begins playing along with a piano, and then rises up with a crescendo of synths. This leads into “I’m In No Mood,” which sounds like a cheap middle school play (in a good way). The piano has this brittle, outdated sound to it as synths swoop back and forth occasionally and sometimes take over everything for a short burst of dance-punk. The song quietly slips into “Black-Hearted Boy”, a melancholic song that could easily be from a 50’s sci-fi flick.

Another big difference between Bitter Tea and Blueberry Boat is that The Fiery Furnaces put some really great hooks into their songs. Each song will grab you by your face and shove it into its proverbial vagina and make you love it. “Bitter Tea” starts off sounding like Four Tet on even more drugs, but if you let it sink in a little bit and mature, it really catches you. After the bizarre, kind of fun synth explosion beginning, a shuffle stomp piano line punches you in the kidneys and makes you want to get up and dance for a few seconds. “Oh Sweet Woods” starts off with a similar, more intense cheesy disco beat and quickly switches to a haunting acoustic guitar line, but switches on the dance beats again for a deliciously funky, groovy track. “Nevers” has a great hip-hop-esque beat to it, while “Waiting to Know You” is a rather nice departure into 50’s doo-wop.

All in all, the album is an absolute success in crafting really catchy, accessible indie rock, while still straying far from the formula of pop-rock. For those who hated Blueberry Boat, such as this reviewer did, give this album a try. It’s different enough from Blueberry Boat to let the haters like it, but similar enough for the die-hard fans to love it. The only downer on the album is “Teach Me Sweetheart”, which is just too long and wears thin very quickly.

--Eirikur Hallsson

Author

gobias industries

Last updated: 09/29/2009 08:54PM