Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9920 in Music
• Released on: 2004-09-27
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 50 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Gwyneth Herbert is the latest female singer-songwriter peddling gentle easy-listening music, but from two very different angles. Bittersweet and Blue is a collection of thirteen songs, ten of which are covers, in either a jazzy folk style a la Eva Cassidy and Norah Jones; the other three are bombastic big-band swing.

The opener is a fairly straight cover of Peggy Lee's "Fever" where Herbert's voice is natural, warm and exceptionally sweet but distracted by the latter part of the signature bass riff being cut, which can't help jarring the arrangement a little. Other notable covers are well known but well chosen to suit Herbert's voice--Portishead's "Glory Box" sounding like an exceptionally polished version of the original and Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" sounding beautiful amidst strings and her intimate voice. Herbert's own songs, co-written with Will Rutter, lean more towards the softer folk side. The title track is a pleasant acoustic ballad, "A Little Less" is more an upbeat swing number that, to its credit, sounds timeless and "Fallen" is MOR at its finest complete with soft Rhodes accompaniment.

There is very little in Bittersweet and Blue to make Gwyneth Herbert stand out as the next big thing but her voice, whilst not that different, is genuinely very strong and very easy on the ear. --Georgina Collins

Customer Reviews

Jazz for jazz haters!
Can't sing, is out of tune, has no concept of what a good song is or how to present one, doesn't listen to jazz, doesn't like jazz, and was dropped from her record label! Need I go on?

Disappointing choice of material
Gorgeous, strong voice. The title track and funky version of Crowded House's Into Temptation excellent. The rest? Heard it all before. Doesn't say anything that hasn't been said many times already!

i see you now, in faded corduroy...
firstly i think corduroy is the hardest word to spell ever!!!! but its worth it as this is the central word in the eponymous track - bittersweet and blue. as soon as you hear this word you know that you are in for a real treat. once again gwyn and will combine a sincere mmixture of musical covers and self penned tracks to great effect to create a musical meléé of fantastical pleasure. i got the cd. i put it on. i left it on. repeat. and sank into my chair in pleasure. we all know why we get a cd, weve heard one of the songs and liked it, so we get the album decide the rest are crap and put a few songs on programmed repeat. gwyn has taken out all the hard work for me! i only press repeat once, coz i love evey song on the album, the advanced musical stylings and deep jazz conotations infused with a gravely multi palleted voice. this voice can hadle slow jazz to r and b (where it would be wasted!). god gave an angel a voice to sing, therefore gwyn was born

we love you gwyneth Herbert