Reviewed by Paul J Zickler
Released: December 1981 The Troggs Black Bottom Genre: Garage Rock Rating: 2.5 out of 5 Highlights: Widge You Feels Like A Woman I was in a band in high school. We were called Bob. At the time, it felt like a very original name, and we thought it was funny. “Hi, we’re Bob.” We were a band before any of us could really play an instrument. At one point, we played a “show” (actually 3 songs at a Catholic church dance) where all of our instruments were borrowed from other people. One of the three songs we could play at that point was The Troggs’ Wild Thing. It only has three chords. I was the lead singer on most of our songs, but everybody in the band sang the line “But I wanna know for sure” every time it came around. It was 1981. None of us had any idea The Troggs were still active that year. If we had somehow found this album, released on the French punk label New Rose records, it would surely have elicited many giggles upon listening. It’s not that The Troggs were ever masters of subtlety and musical sophistication, but they weren’t embarrassing to listen to either. Some of these songs are really awkward. Strange Movie is Reg Presley’s detailed description of acting out scenes from a porno film, complete with panting. Hot Days describes the singer’s inability to hide his, er, excitement when he sees his baby while wearing shorts in the summertime. In I Don’t, Reg speak-sings a Veruca Salt tantrum about what he doesn’t want his girl to do (don’t call me all the time, don’t talk about politics, don’t get too skinny, don’t do what you feel like, basically just please me when I want it). Cringe. I can imagine the label that released Dead Kennedys in Europe might find all this quite delightful, especially with the band’s garage rock history. Musically, there’s not much to complain about if you’re looking for basic caveman rock. Sonically, it’s very flat and lifeless for the most part, but I doubt there were a lot of big name producers lining up to man the boards for a band whose last major hit came in 1966. There are a few highlights. Widge You features some wonderfully noisy, yet basically non-distorted, guitar noodling, and a throwback sound. Feels Like a Woman adds some fuzz and sounds like it was recorded in a basement, but in a good way. The lyrics are dumb, but not cringey dumb, just Troggsy dumb. The album closes with the obligatory Love Is All Around-like ballad, titled I Love You Baby. It’s not hard to imagine it being written in 1968, and as a song it’s not so bad. Unfortunately whatever charms it may have are marred by truly awful production. They probably should have all tuned their instruments to the organ, which may have been left out in the rain or something? Also maybe don’t feature the bongos quite so high in the mix, or get someone more rhythmically gifted to play them if you do. Bob never really went anywhere as a band. We usually had a good time playing together, but we were never serious enough to make anything out of it. In the early 2000’s, I used the GarageBand app on my Mac to create a virtual song, including all the original members, even the drummer, who lives in Japan. Thinking about it now, that would have been about 25 years after we started playing, still far more than the 17 years between The Troggs debut and this album. Time is strange.
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