“If Ned Kelly was a woman, with a penchant for vicious amphetamines,
and her gang used honey mandolins to flail the wicked:
they would sound like this.”

The Bitter Sweets are an unlikely quartet of miscreants united by their anachronistic
incapacity to entirely fit into contemporary society. Their habits are unpopular, their
clothing a little too formal. Their music is inspired by the era that preceded the
divisions of country, popular music and jazz which makes them sound thoroughly
post-modern but don't be fooled....

Evocative, this music is many things; a catch in the voice, being close to tears, the
grain of the song, rough and real like timber, a holler, a hoot, woodsmoke settled in
the hills, the collection of kindling,  Timbre, timber, emotion, to carry you further up
the mountain. This is the meat and potatoes of living, the gritty dirt of a life well
lived. Listening to the Bitter Sweets is akin to sitting on the veranda with close
friends and getting too drunk and stoned, sharing the profound mundane business
of being a human bean. 

An acoustic group, persistent in the use of condenser microphones on
stage, The Bitter Sweets are: Jen - vocals, stomp box, ukulele and at times, if
pressed, the kazoo, Chris - guitar and banjo, Simon - guitar and Tom double bass and
lap steel. Their live performances are marked by an old fashion austerity in delivery -
traditional murder ballads, bluegrass standards, sassy rockabilly, a fascination for
songs about miners and  trains and their original songs - a strange hybrid of
country fried jazz folk blues. 

Recorded in one day,'further up the mountain’, (released independently April 2009)
has a live atmosphere, immediacy unusual in contemporary recordings. Many
of the songs on further up the mountain are first takes - there are minimal overdubs. The
recordings catch the phantom sound of the room, hands on strings, breath. The songs
talk about the dirty business of living - murder, drug addiction, mining the humour of being poor,
relationship breakdown, empowerment, the romance of a new love
- all with a live, like there's no tomorrow kind of intensity.

BUY - "further up the mountain"

“Fun and serious fighting to prevail: sometimes you think of the Soggy Bottom Boys, or with
Jennifer there, a spicy Rosetta Tharpe. Then again perhaps a revived Cash and June Carter,
as on Sunny Side of the Mountain”.
Mieke Geukens (Marcie) www. roots time. be March 2009 Belgium