★★★★★
NRBQ started up in 1967, making it a band almost as vintage as, say, the Rolling Stones. But unlike its theoretical contemporaries, NRBQ could never become one of those rock dinosaurs--a band trapped by its past, forced to repeat "Satisfaction" or "Start Me Up" until even old people think it's a bit much. Nope. NRBQ is a little band, a band many folks have heard of (or even heard in concert) but with not one hit song and not even really a defining album...
- www.popmatters.com
2012-07-12
★★★★★
Happy Happy! Joy Joy! That's how you feel after singing thought lighthearted Zydeco tune "Boozoo and Leona" that opens this fun and frothy collection from musical stalwarts NRBQ. Of course, you never know what you'll hear on their discs; they touch on more styles than a college radio station. Their unifying thread is Terry Adams' vocals and bouncy keyboards...
- www.ink19.com
2011-08-15
★★★★★
Ever since Mike Jahn called this group the best since the Beatles (something like that) it has been the victim of terrible anti-hype. Four or five of the cuts on this album are really compelling, and while the rest is marred by a kind of cute funkiness, it is original and grows on you. Dig their version of Sun Ra's "Rocket Number 9."
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
Here's the fun record these fabled funsters have had in them for fifteen years. Concentrating on original novelty tunes, all big requests at parties, it neutralizes their fatal cuteness by making a virtue of it, with highlights that include tributes to their manager and their sweeties, a throwaway rockabilly raver, and yuck-it-ups about hard times...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
The first live album by the Northeast's finest road band stands a chance of showing the rest of the world what it's been missing. It also runs the risk of revealing how the rest of the world managed to stay away. Face it, fans--expecting the same old unexpected can deaden the synapses too, and 20 years can put the snazziest key changes and time signatures in a rut. One set, no song list, audience all unawares, hot-cha-cha.
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
First cute, then peculiar, then annoying, their callow act is turning positively perverse as they twinkle-toe past 40. "Boy's Life" and "Immortal for a While" are only where they state their interest in so many words--everywhere Joey Spampinato's eager eternal-adolescent whine rubs up against Terry Adams's sly grownup changes. They may be smart enough to consider this a creative tension, but it isn't. It's an evasion--a fib as opposed to a lie, kiddies--and it isn't funny anymore.
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
Although I give them points for stick-to-it-iveness and good cheer, their records have always struck me as complacent because even the subtlest r&b has a more pronounced backbeat. But on his second try, drummer Tom Ardolino makes a marginal but telling difference--the performance is urgent, intense, up, so that even given their adolescent romantic preoccupations (life on the road, it keeps you young) the songs take on a complex life worthy of their chord changes...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
This band continues to live up to its full name (now Quartet rather than Quintet again), suggesting a cross between a chamber group (virtuosity and rhythmic decorum) and the New Lost City Ramblers (intelligent folkiness). Terry Adams plays rock and roll like a man who knows jazz wasn't invented by Chick Corea, and I do enjoy their sense of humor--the organ pumping into "C'Mon if You're Coming," or the out-of-synch, out-of-timbre Adams blues piano that undercuts "Blues Stay Away From Me...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
I've never quite gotten with the abbreviation. New doesn't mean cute, or fancy, or at least it shouldn't, and rhythm-and-blues doesn't mean this. I don't understand why they turned the Q into Quintet by adding singer Frank Gadler, either--all he's ever added is more cuteness, even doing a John Sebastian on one cut. They're tuneful as hell, but so arch--"Who Put the Garlic in the Glue?" indeed--that the only tune I can bear to contemplate is "Magnet." Which attracts me like one...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
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