The Bitter Pills – The Bitter Pills

The Bitter Pills – The Bitter Pills
Self Release
Release date: 25/09/26
Review by Jon Deaux
7/10
The Bitter Pills go down loud and leave a nasty aftertaste — which, medically speaking, is exactly what a pill’s meant to do.

Eastbourne.

Here the connection of rock’n’roll with the danger would be absolutely inappropriate. It’s a place, where after nine p.m. the biggest noise will be the noise of somebody releasing the wind and giving the immediate verdict concerning the position of the wheelie bins.

People of the old age, deck chairs, promenade in the seaside area, those who consider that food intake later than six p.m. is a suicidal act. Nothing in common with Bexhill, the place that is fondly called God’s waiting room, but orthopedic footwear can’t be neglected.

But anyway, despite the odds, there arise The Bitter Pills, the band, which watching the calm atmosphere of the retirement home in Eastbourne thought, “Screw it, we should have amplifiers”.

The debut album of the band, bearing the name of the band itself, is somewhat unfortunate, as it appeared to be pretty good, especially for a band from Eastbourne.

Chris Cooper and Nico Sc’erri have been friends for more than ten years. It’s a long period of time to get married, to divorce, to have a problem kid and find out that a person you thought to be you is a untreated anxiety disorder.

So, what did they do with all that friendship?

They started their debut album with the track “F.U.”

More than ten years of friendship and the first track is a song, in which two guys ask someone to f**k off.

Marvelous.

Rock’n’roll reduced to basics – friendship, amplification and unresolved issues.

There’s no spoken-word intro. No field recording from train station. No ambient synth track titled “Prologue To The End Of Everything”. Only “F.U.”

Sc’erri’s vocal is not conventional. Fortunately, it’s exactly what should be. He sounds like a man who had to read a speech without knowing that he’ll have to give it. Sc’erri’s vocal has straining and rasping high register, as if each note had to be torn out of him using a crowbar.

It works. Very importantly, his vocal doesn’t float over the guitars. It battles with them.

The guitars themselves are fat and distorted, they sound not as the palette of the pedals, but as an audio device that experienced some traumatic event. Pedals? Not at all. These guitars sound as they were drenched in rain and asked to cope with it.

Cooper’s drumming is precise and concise. There’s little space left in that sonic cupboard, and that’s the biggest strength and the most obvious weakness of this record.

When The Bitter Pills hit the mark, they really hit it. But when they miss, there’s no chance to hide it.

“My Desire” is a pretty decent rock song, written and performed much better than any pub-rock band could manage. But the competency is a dangerous drug.

British guitar music has been overdosing on it for decades.

There’re thousands of bands able to write a decent riff, compose a decent chorus and sound well during performing it. The result is always the music that is neither so bad that you could hate it nor so interesting that you could remember it.

“My Desire” is such a case. It’s good. Only not The Bitter Pills good. And that’s what makes this album so annoying – you can hear a much better band in it.

Then “Bad Monday” appears and the bastards finally let themselves off the leash.

It’s The Bitter Pills’ calling card.

The verse is chained to one nasty riff, the chorus opens the doors wide and suddenly the guitars don’t play anymore – they fill the building. Sc’erri raises his vocal by an octave for the hook, adding just right touch of melody without overwhelming the song with anything superfluous.

The riff sounds like it just realized that the meeting could be held using the e-mail.

That’s how the rock song should be made.

Get into the house. Make a mess. Leave. Don’t explain yourself. Don’t start podcasting about your songwriting process.

Just break something and leave.

Aggressiveness of the song brings to light another important fact about The Bitter Pills – they will make much more sense in the sweaty club rather than through the tinny speakers of somebody’s laptop pretending to work.

You can almost smell the beer.

You can hear the guitars sweating.

Somewhere there’s a man whose hearing got permanently ruined.

Rock music lives.

Unfortunately, this album is unable to maintain this impact forever.

“Set Me Free” is the point when the machinery starts showing itself.

Verse.

Building.

Releasing.

Chorus.

Emotional escalation.

One can almost see the arrows on that songwriter’s whiteboard.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with it.

Exactly the problem.

The bad songs at least leave a bruise.

This one leaves a receipt.

“Something To Say” is also trapped in the same trap. The performance is convincing. The drums are driving. The guitars attack the listener with sufficient power. Sc’erri strains his vocal. All the elements of the machine do their job.

But everybody does it too efficiently to cause a fucking accident.

There’s not enough friction between the elements.

The album sometimes confuses the intensity with escalation, as if increasing the volume of everything only a bit could make it new idea.

It doesn’t.

Sometimes the best thing a rock band can do is shutting the guitars up. Which, to their credit, The Bitter Pills do.

“Bittersweet Memories” is the point where the album gets the depth.

The guitars become thinner.

The song breathes.

Sc’erri finally gets some space around his vocal and suddenly that roughness, which sounded aggressive in other songs, turns into vulnerability.

Then “Shattered Dreams” comes and it takes it even further.

The drums retreat.

The vocal steps forward.

And suddenly the listener understands that under all these riffs, screams and overall destruction of the property the duo has something to say.

Bastards.

Now I have to take them seriously.

These songs show that The Bitter Pills don’t need the wall of distortion to sound heavy. In fact, they are arguably even more impressive when they don’t try to throw the entire amplifier in the face of the listener.

Sc’erri doesn’t need to strain every single note to convey the emotion.

Cooper doesn’t need to beat seven shades of shit out of the kit to create the tension.

The restraint creates the weight.

And this is the lesson loud songs sometimes tend to forget.

The restraint creates the weight.

And there’s an interesting band hiding behind these quiet songs.

Not that I’d say about it to Classic Rock Magazine.

Since once you are called “promising” in a press release, your career is already considered to be a crime scene.

By “Would You Lie To Me” the pattern becomes too easy to notice.

Riff. Stomp. Shout. Emotional revelation. Riff again.

Absolutely respectable formula. But so is a Greggs sausage roll.

The repetition is important, since the songs are generally quite good. But when the listener notices the formula of the song, the pay-off becomes predictable.

And the predictability is dangerous in the aggressive music.

If the band is going to scream, it better occasionally make the listener wonder what is going on.

Drop the drums.

Delay the chorus.

Let the riff disappear.

Put the vocal in the unusual place.

Make the listener to spill the drink.

Since the foundation is already there. The band doesn’t need better materials. It needs to occasionally knock down a wall.

And there’s “So Glad Your Mine”.

Yes, Your. Not you’re. Grammar catastrophe in the song about possessive romantic attachment.

Maybe it’s a concept album.

Maybe Eastbourne has its own dialect.

Or maybe apostrophes are simply too punk.

Whatever it is, it’s impossible not to imagine someone in the studio noticing the title and deciding to screw it up, as rock’n’rolls go.

And it’s completely justified.

The song is about that complicated topic of wanting someone who is leaving already, which gives almost poetic quality to that grammatical catastrophe.

The relationship is falling apart. The grammar is falling apart. Everything goes to hell in a handcart. Consistency is important.

The song is romantically sincere in the way that the slow-motion car crash is romantic if one squints and takes off one’s glasses after suffering significant brain damage.

Actually, there’s something nice about the imperfections of the record. It’s not polished till it smells like laminate flooring.

It’s possible to hear the band rather than the branding exercise and that means something.

The middle part of the album is definitely the weakest part.

There’re too many songs built on the same scheme – establishing the riff, building the tension, increasing the volume, hitting the chorus, repeating till somebody in the control room nods.

It works. Till it stops working.

The irony is that the band has everything it needs to solve the problem.

There’s a singer who’s capable to sound vulnerable. There’s a drummer who’s able to restrain himself and there’re the guitars that sound huge when returning.

They only need to trust their equipment a little bit more.

Delayed chorus here.

Sudden dropout there.

Totally exposed vocal.

Refractory drum pattern.

Silence.

Anything.

The louder the band becomes, the more important becomes the silence. Dynamics and drama.

One cannot keep punching the listener in the face and expect that the 37th blow would have the same effect as the first one.

Ultimately, the listener starts wondering where the ambulance is.

And then there’s “When We Are Gone” and the lights turn off.

The tempo slows down.

The chords turn elegiac.

The guitars, previously distorted enough to give some nearby insurance companies a heart attack, clean up for the outro.

Suddenly there’s space.

Much of it.

And having spent most of the album beaten up with riffs, that space sounds enormous.

Moreover, it appears that subject matter of the song allows the album’s aggression to find some outlet.

Mortality hangs over the song, but thankfully The Bitter Pills don’t use it as a chance to stand on a hill and scream WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE! while an orchestra is wailing in the background.

Subtle enough.

Album seems to have realized that there is something under that noise.

Something human.

Something temporary.

The record sounds like someone has taken mortally serious attitude to the issue and decided to plug a Marshall stack into it.

Fair enough.

Haven’t heard of worse coping mechanisms.

Why is it important? Because The Bitter Pills seem most convincing when there’s something to react to.

The loud songs are good.

The riffs are good.

Sc’erri can scream.

Cooper can drive a song like he’s trying to get somewhere before the police notice.

But it is the quiet stuff which shows the band’s true personality.

Anger is what gets you through the door.

Riffs are what makes you look around.

Vulnerability is what makes you stay.

And if next time the band manages to properly combine those elements – to make songs less predictable without polishing the rawness – they might end up having something substantially more dangerous than a good debut.

An identity.

Right now The Bitter Pills is a raw, riff-oriented debut that occasionally reaches for the obvious while having something stranger right in their hands.

It’s frustrating.

It’s promising.

It’s loud.

It’s repetitive.

It’s considerably more alive than technically superior guitar records that have been polished until they start smelling like laminate flooring.

The Bitter Pills haven’t perfected the formula.

They have found the ingredients.

Now they need to fuck with the recipe.

Preferably somewhere where amplifiers would be turned on very, very loud.

Preferably not after six.

The residents of Eastbourne have suffered enough.

TRACKLISTING:
00. F.U.,
01. My Desire,
02. Bad Monday,
03. Set me free,
04. Something to say,
05. Scream my name,
06. Bittersweet memories,
07. Shattered dreams,
08. Would you lie to me,
09. So glad your mine,
10. When we are gone

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