| Rating |
Summary |
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| n/a by www.cokemachineglow.com |
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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| n/a by www.nytimes.com |
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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| n/a by arts.guardian.co.uk |
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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| n/a by Pitchfork Media |
This is not by any stretch a turn toward the accessible, though there are a few great pop moments. |
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| n/a by www.stylusmagazine.com |
Bitter Tea is probably my favorite Fiery Furnaces album to date, but it isn’t without snags. |
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| n/a by www.avclub.com |
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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| n/a by www.shakingthrough.net |
The Furnaces refuse to play it commonplace... which is both their greatest strength and most frustrating weakness. |
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| n/a by Billboard |
The densely produced layers of previous works are gone in favor of a big and bright fun-house feel. |
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| n/a by Popmatters |
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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| n/a by www.villagevoice.com |
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. |
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| n/a by neumu.net |
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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| n/a by www.drownedinsound.com |
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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| n/a by www.prefixmag.com |
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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| n/a by uk.launch.yahoo.com |
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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| n/a by www.austinchronicle.com |
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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| n/a by www.nowtoronto.com |
Two-thirds of the songs fail to cohere. |
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| n/a by www.slantmagazine.com |
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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