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ALT-ROCK
Fiery Furnaces,
"Bitter Tea" (Fat Possum) *
Much too scattered and
unfocused and way too prolific for their own good, "Bitter Tea" is the fifth
studio effort in three years from the Oak Park natives and brother-sister
duo of multi-instrumentalist Matthew and singer Eleanor Friedberger. The
indie-rock darlings describe this album in their press materials as "a very
girly record -- the granddaughter record, as opposed to the grandmother
record."
By that, Fiery Furnaces
mean that where their last release, 2005's "Rehearsing My Choir," was
designed as a narrative song cycle based on the memories of their
80-year-old grandma, Olga Sarantos, "Bitter Tea" is allegedly some sort of
sprawling conceptual effort about the life and loves of a modern young
woman, presumably Eleanor, who was hailed as a muse on the second album from
her boyfriend Alex Kapranos' band, Franz Ferdinand. I say "allegedly" and
"presumably" because I'll be damned if I can figure out any of the
pretentiously arch-poetic lyrics; the songs that make the most sense to me
are "Black-Hearted Boy" and "The Vietnamese Telephone Ministry" -- the ones
with the backwards vocals.
The impressionistic
lyrics certainly aren't the only problem here. Obviously better at spinning
the press than spinning a decent, coherent melody, Matt Friedberger
encourages us to think of the band's sound as "sissy psychedelic Satanism."
Try "a sprawling, pointlessly complex mess" instead. Think of a wannabe Tom
Waits channeling "Looney Tunes" composer Carl Stalling, without a sense of
humor but with a con man's desire to peddle garbage-pail eclecticism as high
art.
Better yet, don't give
the band a second thought, unless or until they drop the artsy posing and
figure out what they're really trying to do.
Jim DeRogatis
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