The Bobs have made a career out of teetering on the edge of being too cute; on their second album of a cappella cover songs, they went right over the top. While the less sanctimonious lovers of the '60s may have appreciated their takes on Cream's "White Room," and the Jimi Hendrix Experience's "The Wind Cries Mary," and The Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever" (the more sanctimonious would have muttered, "Are these guys kidding or what?"), applying their tribute/parody approach to material that had long-since acquired camp ...
Read More
The Bobs have made a career out of teetering on the edge of being too cute; on their second album of a cappella cover songs, they went right over the top. While the less sanctimonious lovers of the '60s may have appreciated their takes on Cream's "White Room," and the Jimi Hendrix Experience's "The Wind Cries Mary," and The Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever" (the more sanctimonious would have muttered, "Are these guys kidding or what?"), applying their tribute/parody approach to material that had long-since acquired camp status--the Trammps' "Disco Inferno" and Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?"--added little to the fruitiness of those songs, and when The Bobs decided to approach songs that were already outright comic or ironic -- Randy Newman's "Lonely At The Top," Leonard Cohen's "Bird On a Wire" (here combined with "Surfin' Bird"), and They Might Be Giants' "Particle Man" -- all they achieved was redundancy. On the other hand, their performance of The Grateful Dead's "The Golden Road" rescued a lost '60s classic. ~ William Ruhlmann, Rovi
Read Less