http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/theboomtownrats/albums/album/109806/review/5945630/mondo_bongo

Interesting reviews!

TONIC Apr, 5 1979

The Boomtown Rats are one of the hottest acts in England now, and on the surface it's not hard to understand why. Their second album, A Tonic for the Troops (released by Columbia in the U.S., with two cuts recycled from last year's debut LP on Mercury), is an inventive and melodically forceful piece of work, glossily ingratiating all the way. Yet these guys strike me as far too impressed by their own wit to be particularly incisive or convincing musically. They're intelligent, all right, but theirs is a wiseass, off-putting smartness that's clever in the most limiting sense of the word.

As a rock & roll band, the Rats have plenty of talent, especially Johnnie Fingers' keyboard work and the sharp, fluid guitar lines of Garry Roberts and Gerry Cott. But the material is often more interesting to think about than to hear: A Tonic for the Troops is one of those records whose lyric sheet scans a lot better than its songs sound. "(I Never Loved) Eva Braun," for instance, has a wonderful "Leader of the Pack" opening ("Are you really going out with Adolf?" a girl's voice asks breathlessly) and one or two nice lines, yet the overbearingly parodic backup vocals dictate the listener's reaction. Chief songwriter/lead singer Bob Geldof, here as elsewhere, presses the comic point too hard with every arch inflection of his voice. "Living in an Island" purports to be outrageously black-humored about suicide, but trips itself up with overly precious game playing: "... you're a true blue sui-/Side by side they walked into the tide...." It's the kind of joke that was daring and sophisticated in the fourth grade—"Over the Cliff" by Hugo First, and all that.

Almost every cut eventually loses momentum because of overextended lyrical and instrumental showing off. Only "Blind Date" punches through with simple words and concise, unpretentious treatment. The two songs that even remotely deserve the length of their running times—"Rat Race" and "Joey's on the Street Again," a couple of intricate, Bruce Springsteen-like urban narratives—are so stylistically at variance with the rest of the album that they seem to have been recorded by a different band. (Interestingly enough, in these numbers Geldof abandons his preening, Monty Python yelp to slip into a smoldering, "Born to Run" drawl. Commercially at least, he's nobody's fool.) Derivative as these compositions are, they're still the best ones on A Tonic for the Troops. For the rest, the Boomtown Rats would appear to be well on their way to becoming no more than a classy version of the Tubes. And everyone knows that the Tubes' lack of class is almost the only appealing thing about them. (RS 288)

TOM CARSON

SURFACING Feb, 21 1980

Thematically, paranoia rears its nasty head an awful lot here: in "Someone's Looking at You," "Nothing Happened Today" and the schizophrenic exhibitionism of "Having My Picture Taken." This is especially true in "I Don't Like Mondays," the Boomtown Rats' controversial British smash in which the ostentatious wash of violins strikes a soap-operatic contrast with the unsettling notion of a young girl shooting people and blaming it on a day of the week.

A certain artistic paranoia also permeates The Fine Art of Surfacing, this Irish band's third album. Having mastered the finer art of making postpunk hits on A Tonic for the Troops by perpetrating a mockery of various pop icons, disguising perversely simple hooks in a flurry of rowdy R&B riffs and spotlighting Bob Geldof's vocal looning, the Rats now try to prove they're made of more serious stuff, only to take a few lumps for their hubris.

In "Wind Chill Factor (Minus Zero)," these guys are so busy displaying their trump cards (the snap of drummer Simon Crowe's percussive undertow, the crackle of Garry Roberts' and Gerry Cott's guitars, the exuberant pop of the vocal harmonies) that the song is left eating the dust of its own hyperkinetic arrangement. Geldof even has the cheek to rewrite "Rat Trap." A Tonic for the Troops' backalley scenario, as "When the Night Comes." Here, the unaffecting tale of an office romance is loaded down with Spanish-sounding guitar breaks and street-corner finger snapping that are completely inappropriate to the subject matter.

But there's no denying the spirit with which Geldof and the Boomtown Rats go about their Bowieesque business. Striking a variety of poses somewhere between the manic overacting of Sparks and the jock-rock cool of Thin Lizzy, the Rats pull every trick they know: reggae-dub sound effects, Shangri-Las choruses and, at the end of "Sleep (Fingers' Lullaby)," the Gothic vocal riff from the Beatles' "Blue Jay Way." Then they dare you to spot the influences while tapping a foot to the frantic beat of "Nice 'n' Neat" or "Nothing Happened Today." As a lyricist, Geldof may be glib, but he can deploy a potentially horrific couplet like "We'd take a recipe for religion And bring it to the theological kitchen" with such self-parodying panache that the usual charges of insincerity don't quite hold water.

In fact, much of the Boomtown Rats' smarmy charm comes from an elusiveness that defies categorization because it draws from dozens of sources but embraces none. Indeed, there's so much going on during The Fine Art of Surfacing that you have to come up for air more than once. Yet as an adventure in pop art, it's always worth another plunge. (RS 311)

DAVID FRICKE

MONDO May 28 1981

If eclecticism were a crime, there'd be enough evidence on Mondo Bongo to put the Boomtown Rats away for life. Like last year's The Fine Art of Surfacing, the new LP is an intoxicating mixture of pop and punk. It's an occasionally daft but always dazzling array of everything from vanilla reggae ("Banana Republic," actually a satiric poke at the Northern Ireland mess) to electro-mantra ("This Is My Room") to manic, Copacabanastyle boogie ("Please Don't Go") to rock & roll ("Straight Up").

Their courage bolstered by a series of hit singles in the U.K., the Rats indulge in some of their wildest fantasies here. Songwriter singer Bob Geldof takes a cue from Ed Sanders' Tales of Beatnik Glory for the hyperkinetic rhythm and rap of "Mood Mambo." He also has the nerve to rewrite the Rolling Stones' "Under My Thumb" as a punky piece of social protest. These guys liberally and literally borrow licks, with Geldof dipping heavily into David Bowie's bag of vocal mannerisms while Beatles riffs surface in "Up All Night" (the "beep-beep" refrain of "Drive My Car") and "Go Man Go" (the orchestral coda of "Piggies").

But the band weaves its fantasies and felonies into a rich fabric of sound: lots of guitars, Johnny Fingers' army of keyboards, drums bouncing off the walls of producer Tony Visconti's heavily echoed mix. "Go Man Go" and "Hurt Hurts," both drenched with dub effects and instruments that interweave with more rhyme than reason, may be too much of a good thing. Yet when song and sound meet cute and merge right, as in "Don't Talk to Me" and "The Elephants Graveyard," the result is invigorating and whirlwind pop music shot through with rock & roll smarts.

Whatever their excesses (e.g., Geldof's occasional lyrical overreach, chronic overarranging), the Boomtown Rats dare to dive headfirst into areas that few postpunk bands have ever even contemplated. On Mondo Bongo, it's really easy to appreciate those marvelous midair leaps. (RS 344)

DAVID FRICKE