The Bobs - Press

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Rock in a Hard Place
Sam Hurwitt
East Bay Express

I must confess that I like a lot of silly music, just like any other geek who spent his early teens huddled listening to The Dr. Demento Show as if the radio were the only source of heat in the house. But really, it's hard not to love the Bobs. The primarily a cappella group has been hopping around the Bay Area for twenty years now, the band celebrated its anniversary recently with a new disc called Coaster on, appropriately enough, Primarily A Cappella Records. It's not your older brother's Bobs, mind you. Cofounder Gunnar Madsen left ten years ago, and was replaced by Joe Finetti, and Janie Scott begot Lori Rivera, who in turn begot Amy Engelhardt. But the killer combination of vocal chops and sly humor is still there in spades on this, their tenth album.

Coaster begins beautifully, with comic vocal horns tooting out Duke Ellington's "Caravan," for all intents and purposes a doo-wop instrumental -- never mind the lack of, you know, instruments. Some of the material's inevitably boomer-specific; I can't begin to relate to "The Drive Time Blues": "Stuck in my car with NPR / It can't get through my personal fog / Did I feed the dog? Yes, I fed the dog." And there's a cat song, which I'm against as a rule (There are few more horrifying sentences in the world than "This is a poem I wrote about my cat.") But I can get behind "The Druid Song," an amusingly overblown plea for the trees. "Perhaps if man would just shut up, a tree could make a sound," Engelhardt sings, undermined by bass Richard Greene intoning, "We're talking tree."

Other delights include perverting the Doors' "Light My Fire" into a madrigal, an awfully cute stab at hip-hop from the perspective of a frontin' mall rent-a-cop, and "Bach to Bach," an amusing duet between Greene and Engelhardt of Mrs. Bach trying to get some action out of her hard-working hubby Johann, who intones, "If I could only write/ a hit like Handel...." "She Made Me Name You Earl" offers a smooth, sorta barbershop-style lament for a gentleman's Johnson, and there's some serious "Sweet Adeline" action on "Barber Lips," an updated (or maybe downdated) version of the group's old "Cowboy Lips."

One unexpected oddity is "the Turtle Cycle," four songs inspired by monologist Josh Kornbluth's piece Turtle Boy, including some Manhattan Transfer-style vocal orchestrations, a bit of smarmy schlock-pop, and the affecting spiritual-style "That Old Swamp (Is Getting Me Down)," penned and sung by Greene. The gospel number that ends the album, rousing despite how very white it is, gives a joyful shout-up to the "A Cappella Choir in the Sky." "And when you let the devil on the stage, / a good show can turn bad / Like Cats or Rent or Stomp / or heaven knows, Forever Plaid" But the Bobs still seem to be keeping that old devil at bay.