Bob Bert has sat in the drummer’s seat for a number of highly regarded bands, a few of them vastly important to underground rock’s march forward from the 1980s into the current century. He’s still quite active on the scene, with the newly released Beach Bongo Burnout his first album to hit stores under his own name. A truly solo affair, it finds Bert spurning the guitar, smacking away with his rhythm sticks and plattering up a rapid-fire burst of raw inspiration. It’s out now on vinyl, compact disc, and digital through Bar/None Records.
The band that always gets named first in capsule biographies of Bob Bert is Sonic Youth, the outfit that commences the chronology of his discography. If not his first outlet of artistic expression, the Sonic Youth LPs Confusion Is Sex (1983) and Bad Moon Rising (1985) landed Bert in the history books, and his subsequent clanging and banging in Pussy Galore ensured his relevance.
Replacing John Hammill, Bert is the drummer on the biggest chunk of Pussy Galore’s output right up to the end. After that, as the 1990s dawned, Bert played in Action Swingers, Bewitched, and Chrome Cranks while collaborating with Kid Congo Powers and Lydia Lunch. More recently, Bert rejoined Pussy Galore’s Jon Spencer in the Hitmakers.
So yeah, Bob Bert’s been around the block a few times in the touring van. One might anticipate that his first solo album would be one of those years-in-the-making situations where he rounded up a dozen or so big names from his cohort, and when the schedules coincided, they got down to the business of making a big splash.
Those kinds of records can work out fine, but that’s not what Bert has put together with Beach Bongo Burnout; the difference is seemingly obvious because the sounds are nearly all made by him. However, the solo thing, that’s not really it. Going it alone can also result in a meticulously conceived, fussed-over hubbub.
Bert’s album registers like the exact opposite of that. As the pieces pile up, the atmosphere radiates with what sounds like the results of quick inspiration, unpolished but not sloppy. It’s very punk and connects like it could’ve emerged in the late 1970s or a little later, but it also unwinds like an oddball fringe album cut by some punker who dug synths and had grown weary of the same old guitar-based thing while being disinclined to go sophisto.
The intent isn’t to smooth off the rough edges but to find more interesting manners of disruption without leaving songwriting behind. Bert’s original songs on Beach Bongo Burnout are just fine, but many of them are brief as they weave into a potent whole with crazed cover choices, beginning with an appropriately dyspeptic resurrection of “Fuck You, Man” by Pussy Galore, with backing shouting by his former Pussy Galore bandmate Julia Cafritz.
From there, the selections include David Peel & the Lower East Side (“Oink Oink”), Richard Hell (“Love Comes In Spurts”), Jonathan Richman (“Pablo Picasso”), a minute-long combo truncation of two Public Image Limited tracks from Flowers of Romance (“Four Enclosed Walls/Banging the Door”), the Barbarians (“Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl”), and The Velvet Underground (“Foggy Notion”).
Sticking out considerably is a beautifully demented version of Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen.” It brings the crazed spirit of The Residents at their best into a decidedly more DIY realm. If wild and rough, Beach Bongo Burnout is never shoddy. It shows that Bob Bert is disinclined to mellow with age. That’s great news in terribly conformist, careerist times.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
