Ladies and gentlemen, the Fiery Furnaces are back.
Not that they ever really went away, of course. Their last album was released a mere six months ago, and their EP (which is a full length album) was released only nine months before that. And Blueberry Boat came only six months before that. So if you're keeping track, Bitter Tea, released next week but widely available on the internet for at least the last month, is their fourth full length album in under two years.
With the hindsight provided by Bitter Tea, last October's Rehearsing My Choir (links one and two from the archives) can be seen as a one-off diversion. Bitter Tea is the real sequel to Blueberry Boat, following the same insane song structures and cacophony of sounds that have been their trademark since the latter album was released, but also sharing with it a knack for lovely pop melodies that just pop out of the blue and disappear just as quickly.
If nothing else, the Fiery Furnaces are proof that being a great band and not being utterly serious and self-important are not mutually exclusive. It's hard to take some of their stuff seriously because it's just so goofy. Not goofy like the Bloodhound Gang, but goofy in that you might find yourself constantly scratching your head saying "huh?" They're also proof that quality and quantity are not mutually exclusive either (see the above run-down of their prolificness).
So, my point was that Bitter Tea is very similar in content and sound to Blueberry Boat. It is indeed, as promised, "poppier" than Rehearsing My Choir, but that's kind of like buying a light bulb and be promised that it will be brighter than pitch black darkness. If anything, though, the first few tracks are even crazier than Blueberry Boat, cramming enough parts and melodies to fill a nine minute song into three and a half minutes. This is Brian Wilson's fragmented songwriting technique (see "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains") taken to an extreme, not only in the content of the songs, but in the sounds themselves. Each part of any given song might switch at random between a litany of instrumentation including electric pianos, tack piano, dobro guitars, electronic drums, acoustic drums, harpsichord, and a litany of synth sounds last heard on a Kraftwerk record, or maybe an educational film from the 80s.
For the most part, Bitter Tea is almost as good as Blueberry Boat, but it lacks the scope and the range of that album. Its songs build into to what should be huge climactic endings, but fail to really move they way they have in the past. It also kind of peters out at the end, with pointless repeats of two songs that already appear earlier in the album, as if Matthew Friedberger sequenced the album and realized that he could still cram more songs onto the length of a CD.
Don't get me wrong, Bitter Tea is still a damn good album, and the Fiery Furnaces still sound like nobody else on the planet. It's just that, like many people who release really great and idiosyncratic albums, they suffer in comparison with their own back catalogue. They probably will in the future too, without a change in sound (like, well, Rehearsing My Choir).
Final verdict? Very good, but damn it, not quite good enough.
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