DEAR BONGO - All The Good-Hearted People Have A Dumb Face

“Talk about your strengths and weaknesses”. “Strengths: none. Main weakness: kindness”.

In middle school, the author of this article chose to begin an Italian essay assignment exactly that way; it's a well-known fact that such a trait, combined with a more or less pronounced sensitivity, can often turn into more of a burden than an advantage, at least for the person who possesses it, and the evolution of our society up to the present day has done nothing but confirm this. The fear of not living up to expectations (aesthetic, personality-related, tied to various unattainable standards), of not being performative enough, of not knowing how to "sell" and present oneself skillfully, and of consequently being marginalized, is just a small part of what we've been trained to suppress under a thick blanket of anxiety, and the second album by Dear Bongo, "All The Good-Hearted People Have A Dumb Face", illustrates all of this with sharp irony and a none-too-veiled sense of the grotesque. Their cutting debut "Unfullfilled" had carved out a space between post-hardcore and post-punk, aiming to translate the band's live impact onto record, while what emerges from the sophomore effort is a tower of Babel of musical genres, and in a couple of tracks linguistic ones too, coexisting without stepping on each other's toes, within a framework more firmly rooted in art-punk.

The journey kicks off with the garage-punk jolts of the dazed "La Fièvre", where Simone Felici's wild, hallucinated vocals shift between English and French, propelled by Paolo Vaglieco's towering guitar riffs, before moving on to the effective mantras of "How Was It?", centered on the so-called "FOMO", social anxiety par excellence, which slides through verses à la Parquet Courts (and going even further back, Talking Heads), closing with mocking little choruses and guitars straddling psychedelia and glam, before doubling down with the post-hardcore assault of the schizophrenic "The Moralist", reminiscent of Nomeansno, where various toys are trotted out, including a glockenspiel.

Partly closer to the debut's dry production thanks to its prominent rhythmic drive, churned out by percussionist Fabio Remedia and Davide Ingiulla's bassline, "Fit And Preening Man" alternates fierce outbursts with harmonic passages, concealing post-punk echoes of LIFE right through to the Fall of "Hex Enduction Hour".

Uniqueness and authenticity suggest anxiety

The experimentalism of "No Hip Young Guys" moves between overlapping bursts of frenzied saxophones unleashed by tape loops somewhere between James Chance and a bit of John Zorn-style mayhem, with a touch of Devo in the quirky synths, while the crescendo of the long composition "All The Good-Hearted People Have A Dumb Face" opens with an a cappella bluesy vocal and culminates in something close to a triumphant march joined by fast psych-(hard-)rock riffs.

Nothing disorients quite like the ceasefire of "Mind Deceiver", a bare-bones track with acoustic guitar up front swaying between slacker experimentation and pseudo-slowcore shades, fading out into backward-reversed choirs. The closing, elaborate "Es Ist Vorbei" holds one more twist in store, opening with a menacing intro fueled by the bass-drums pairing, the antechamber to a sort of ultimatum made even more forceful by the choice of the German language, before softening and dissolving into a placid, echoing coda reminiscent of (psych-)alt-rock from the late Eighties to early Nineties.

Hard to pin down, Dear Bongo's "All The Good-Hearted People Have A Dumb Face" leaves the listener disoriented and turns restlessness into a disturbing yet irresistible sonic kaleidoscope, reminding us that maybe that seemingly foolish face associated with kindness isn't a limitation, but almost a form of resistance in a world that all too often forgets how to stay human.

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30/04/2026