[review 2006: the odds and ends]

It’s been two years since Blueberry Boat and I’m still not quite sure where I stand on that album. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that I haven’t quite figured out how much I like Bitter Tea, either.

Bitter Tea can be considered the true successor to the band’s breakthrough, Blueberry Boat, even though the Fiery Furnaces have put out two CDs in the intervening years. This is the album where the Friedberger duo get back to the standard modus operandi, minus their grandmother. And this is still very much a Fiery Furnaces album; if you knew where you stood on Blueberry Boat you probably won’t change your mind with Bitter Tea.

So what’s changed? For starters, the new album is more inviting than previous releases. The same distracted heart lies beneath both Blueberry Boat and Bitter Tea, but the former beat the listener senseless with its often frenetic splices and changes of pace. The new release is positively sedate by comparison, the Friedbergers preferring to luxuriate a bit more in their well-fashioned pop hooks instead of cramming them into songs until they burst at the seams. This sets up a bit of a paradox: Bitter Tea has fewer hooks and actually benefits as a result. Huh?

Blueberry Boat had a habit of throwing off the listener at every turn like a wild, untamed horse might throw off a rider. The collage-like construction of the songs often made it hard to follow a song all the way through, especially when you’d just start to get into a groove when suddenly it sounded like you were listening to an entirely different song. Here, the horse doesn’t start to buck until the seventh track, “The Vietnamese Telephone Ministry,” and even then the song doesn’t exactly branch off into a thousand tangents like before. In fact, the majority of the album sticks relatively closely to verses and choruses, though because it’s the Fiery Furnaces we’re talking about it’s not quite that straightforward. You can generally depend on a song to finish with roughly the same melodic hook it began with, which definitely makes it easier to get into the album.

At the same time, however, it’s easy to miss the breakneck pace of Blueberry Boat, even if you don’t necessarily miss the cut-up collage style. Bitter Tea is only occasionally memorable, and the Furnaces still do best when they forget about the backwards samples and the odd song structures—”Police Sweater Blood Vow,” for example, which actually makes me think a bit of Elanor Friedberger channeling Lou Reed. Other choices seem excessive; did we really need a reprieve of “Never” and “Benton Harbour Blues” one song after we heard the originals?

So, the Fiery Furnaces: making some concessions to accessibility, but otherwise just as difficult as usual. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on which side of the fence you stand.