Pitchfork

If you're going to release five albums in a shade over two years, damn straight your sound better be pretty versatile. Luckily, the Furnaces have a lot of angles in their playbook, but none so far afield from their normal aesthetic as this Bitter Tea track, with its quoting of "Billie Jean" note stabs and eerie electric-slide hand-claps. As usual, there's a lot going on musically, but for once the Friedbergers choose not to have all their toys blasting simultaneously-- a warbly guitar, an uncharacteristically seething bassline, and close-mic acoustic finger-picking take turns floating up and sinking back down. As a groove improbably coalesces from these disparate fragments, Eleanor F. narrates yet another kidnapping tale, this time at the hands of beatboxing Mormon accountants, occasionally letting the music handle the hard parts ("And then they sang at me like this"), before a horror-show of guitar squeals and backward loop vocals. Yep, though less literal and fractal than the memories of Rehearsing My Choir, "Oh Sweet Woods" is no less a synesthetic story-song...albeit one more intricately disguised and less backlash-baiting.