“Friday night frenzy as testifier hits his groove with current line-up.
There are those for whom the Blues Explosion are the standard by which Jon Spencer should be judged, but to be caught in tonight’s maelstrom is to acknowledge that he’s pulled together their natural successors. Augmented and reinvigorated by the twentysomething rhythm section of bassist Kendall Wind and drummer Macky Bowman, Spencer is tonight at his most unapologetically feral – a mass of sweat, screams and wide-eyed stares that are met with fuzz, feedback and frantic gestures.
Throughout, songs typically smash into each other, a breathless frenzy of livewire energy that rarely pauses. As their latest material displays convincingly – see the politically charged ramalama of Come On! and the self-fulfilling Step On The Gas – this is a band pulling together to create their own identity. Indeed, wherever the gaze lingers, it’s full-pelt, raw fucking power that comes roaring back.
The excursions into Spencer’s past feel less like reinterpretations than reinventions. Wail dials back the tempo with no loss of intensity, on Bellbottoms Wind plays with filthy intent against Bowman’s pounding, while Spencer strangles his guitar’s neck.
With Ye Nuns bringing up the rear with their thrillingly primitive readings of The Monks’ sacred texts, tonight is a double shot of rock’n’roll moonshine and all the damage that brings.” – Julian Marszalek / Classic Rock (August 2026)
“Bob Bert
Beach Bongo Bloodbath
BAR/NONE
Guitars might be for posers
now.
Bob Bert was Sonic Youth’s first ‘drummer’. Later on he joined NY scuzz-rock destroyers Pussy Galore, where he provided
a steady back beat to the nihilistic chaos. He’s still hanging with Jon Spencer as we speak, banging on trash can lids and throwing cinder blocks. through windows on Spencer’s latest junk-rock albums.
So you’d figure that his first solo record is gonna be drum- heavy. What nobody coulda guessed is that there’s not a guitar to be found anywhere. Bert plays everything, but ‘everything’ is just a drum and one of those shaker egg things and occasionally woozy theremin or some fist-mashing keyboards. It’s got original songs and some amazing covers, like Hells Bells and Mississippi Queen, again with no guitars. It’s such a wild transgression you might fall right off your chair at first, but upon my seventeenth listen I didn’t even miss the goddamn guitars. It’s like the opposite of Metal Machine Music.
Sleazegrinder”
