272. The Incredible Bongo Band - Bongo Rock (1973)
















Track Listing

1. Let There Be Drums
2. Apache
3. Bongolia
4. Last Bongo In Belgium
5. Dueling Bongos
6. In A Gadda Da Vida
7. Raunchy
8. Bongo Rock

Review

Hey! I'm back from Japan, and am extremely Jet lagged, so sorry if this is a bit all over the place. In the meanwhile I'm now a married gentleman with ring on my finger and everything. So, back to the reviews!

Ahhh, the Incredible Bongo Band, the name kind of says it all it's a mix of wackiness with just kitschy crap, a mix between brilliant and unnecessary. There are parts of this album that everyone should listen to and they are called Apache, there are parts of this album which aren't that bad and there are parts which are just plain wastes of time and space, all 4 dimensions of them.

So in the end you have a mixed bag, Apache is a really great cover of the Shadows track and the beat at the beggining has been used to death and helped bring about Hip Hop, again a mixed blessing. You can thank this album for both Grandmaster Flash and Vanilla Ice making you want to at the same time enshrine it and burn it. So there's a lot of bongoing going on here and a lot of it is of great quality, most of the brass was, however unecessary and the best bits are when the Bongos actually take solos and something really good is going on. The embelishments ruin vast amounts of the album. So you should get it only for completeness sake, or just download Apache off somewhere, then sample it and start a new music style. If you really want to buy it you can do so from Amazon UK or UK.

Track Highlights

1. Apache
2. Let There Be Drums
3. Last Bongo In Belgium
4. Dueling Bongos

Final Grade

6/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Although the band released two albums, 1973's Bongo Rock and 1974's Return of the Incredible Bongo Band, the band is best known for its cover of "Apache", a song originally made popular by The Shadows. This record languished in relative obscurity until the late 1970s, when it was adopted by early hip-hop artists, including pioneering DJs Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash, for the uncommonly long percussion break in the middle of the song. Subsequently, many of the Incredible Bongo Band's other releases were sampled by hip-hop producers, and the "Apache" break remains a staple of many producers in drum and bass. The song received popular attention again in 2001 when it was featured in an ad for an Acura SUV. Recently, music critic Will Hermes did an article on Apache and the Incredible Bongo Band for the New York Times.

The song "Let There Be Drums," which was made famous by Sandy Nelson and also performed by The Ventures, was used as the theme song for the long running television show "Atlantic Grand Prix Wrestling" during the 1980's.

What a crap video of Apache, still you only really need the first 8 seconds to realise why this is an important album: