Bitter Tea

While The Fiery Furnaces confounded many with 2005’s Rehearsing My Choir, a CD about their grandmother, who also provided vocals, Bitter Tea is a more normal effort, albeit one with a song about checkbook-balancing Mormons (”Oh Sweet Woods”). Matthew Friedberger continues to create synth-heavy mini?rock operas that alternate between childishly charming and plain irritating. But the real appeal is sister Eleanor, whose voice would be mercurially distinctive were she to repeat a phone number — which she does on ”The Vietnamese Telephone Ministry.”