The Fiery Furnaces - Bitter Tea

Genre rock Publisher Fat Possum External Links Official Fiery Furnaces Website Official Fat Possum Website

The following conversation was overheard recently at a nightspot just prior to an important, headlining act taking the stage. Certain details have been altered to protect the identities and cred of the participants. As this is a secondhand account, and the listener was three sheets to the wind all the while, the reader is advised to take this with a grain - or fifty - of name-brand sea salt.


Laslo: ...and that's why I had to finally just say, you know, eff it, I'm selling What the Game's Been Missing! back. If I give a CD six months to make me a believer and it doesn't happen, well...

Drew: Yeah. Chuck it. Life's too short.

Laslo: You heard the new Ghostface yet?

Drew: Nah.

Laslo: You should totally buy it.

Drew: Yeah?

Laslo: It's bangin' like...like a kick drum.

Drew: I'll have to pick it up at Tower next week when I go to get the new Growing.

Laslo: Righteous.

Drew: I'm getting too old for these places, man.

Laslo: What's your problem tonight?

Drew: What do you mean?

Laslo: You've been miserable ever since we met up at Blimpie's. Kicking rocks into traffic, snarling at the bartender, shoving past people here without a word of warning - this isn't like you, Drew. Que pasa, amigo?

Drew: Wow. Really? I wasn't even aware of all that. Did I hurt anybody's feelings?

Laslo: Very probably.

Drew: It's Bitter Tea, man. It's got me super bummed.

Laslo: Well, that's your own damned fault. You have to ask them to sweeten the tea when you order it, or --

Drew: No, not iced tea - this new Fiery Furnaces record. The general, insistant dullness of the thing is causing me to lash out at complete strangers and inanimate objects.

Laslo: That diverges from my personal experience in that Fiery Furnaces albums merely make me want to assail the Fiery Furnaces themselves with hot pokers. I'll never understand how you can even stomach a minute of their organ-grinder, crazy-pretzel claptrap --

Drew: See, every other time the band came up between us in conversation I was willing and able to counter your fun-hating, anti-Friedberger diatribes, to feint and dodge and dissemble every criticism and cruelty with the oratory panache of a Bill Clinton or a Ronald Reagan. But now I can't be arsed anymore -- there's no more joy in their music, and no more joy in my heart. You were saying?

Laslo: Something like this happened to me with Bad Religion, back in 1995.

Drew: They were like your favorite band, right?

Laslo: Oh yeah.

Drew: How'd you cope?

Laslo: I just went back to the older stuff I'd fallen in love with and played it to death until I convinced myself that The Gray Race was never actually recorded or released, a terrible nightmare brought on by a dinner of rotten stromboli.

Drew: See I tried that too! I made a CD-R of my favorite Fiery Furnaces songs -- "Chris Matthews," "Asthma Attack," "Cousin Chris," others -- and for the last few weeks sulked around downtown in my hooded sweatshirt with the Discman on full blast, just reveling in Eleanor's full-tilt fastbreaks and trips over Matthew's tongue-twisters and instrumental tornadoes like a kid overindulging after an especially productive Halloween haul. But eventually my batteries died, my feet ached, and the lifeless strains of Tea continued to haunt me.

Laslo: That may have been the most on-target album title choice ever, from the sound of things.

Drew: You know, I keep telling myself they were just pooped, drained, spent, from unleashing so much fantastic pop madness on the world in a relatively short span of time.

Laslo: You know what?

Drew: What?

Laslo: Maybe you've just had too much of a good thing.

Drew: It's possible! Happened with Guided By Voices a few years ago. But see, I never could get back into Pollard after that! It's been four years! So I've got The Fear.

Laslo: An entire presidential term.

Drew: God, I hate all these hipsters. They all seem to know each other. How can we all love Sonic Youth? Seriously?

Laslo: Heh, I was just thinking the same thing.

Drew: Maybe they're here for their scenester cred badges or something.

Laslo: What exactly do you hate about the record?

Drew: Well, see, it's like Matthew and Eleanor wrote and recorded their next six albums and then were all "Why don't we just throw the weakest songs on one album and use it as an experiment and see if the cult eats it up? Wouldn't that be funny? Can you help me finish this crossword puzzle?" That trademark manic energy, the zing, is missing altogether, the bottom dropped out. People I respect have called Tea EP part Deux, but that's giving them waaaay too much credit, I think. There's some great stuff at the end -- the reprise of "Nevers" is fantastic, where they keep riffing on the melodic theme in new, ever weirder ways, and the reprise of "Benton Harbor Blues" is great too -- but even that stuff is lightweight, unadventurous, gormless. And there are backmasked synths and vocals all over the place, wasted on songs whose hooks I couldn't hum back to you even at gunpoint. The lyrics I can remember are real winners, with Eleanor in comely top form -- "Teach Me Sweetheart" paints an intriguing portrait of dysfunction between in-laws, some sorta infidelity scenario, an enterprising blogger could extrapolate a great deal and I'd read it -- but Matthew blew his wad on Rehearsing My Choir or those upcoming solo records, I think. I dunno. They need a vacation.

Laslo: You do know that I'm never gonna listen to this record, right?

Drew: This time, who could blame you?