BINGO DREAM BAND: Press

CD Review: Bingo's 'The Cicada and Other Stories'
By Erika Wurst
Published: Thursday, October 16, 2003

I was going to describe Bingo as a Ben Harper/ Jack Johnson kind of fellow with a country twang.

The Cicada and Other Stories
Bingo


Others say he's "American Folk mixed with Eastern India blood." Personally, that sounds lame to me so I'm just going to stick with my "laidback guy rocking without all the fancy electronic mumbo jumbo" stereotype.

Bingo's new album is exploding with exotic instruments that come together to form a unique style Bingo (Kevin Richey) can call his own.

Not too often can you hear sitar, organ and harmonica on the same album. And not too often will a girl with blue hair like it - but the day has come.

While the album isn't too fast-paced (in fact, some songs reach the 11-minute marker and seem to never end), it's definitely music to chill out to. And shit, if you listen to Bingo, you even can claim that you're cultured because you're listening to folk music. I know I feel like a better person because of it.

Bingo's music is just solid hardcore ... just music. No additives or electronic crazy stuff is going on. Just a man and his guitar ... and his harmonica ... and his sitar ... and his piano - and, well, the list goes on and on.

A few instrumental cameos by other artists complete the album and round it out, making it - in my opinion - one rad CD. Whether you're a country fan, a folk junky or a Ben Harper freak looking to expand your CD collection, Bingo definitely is worth giving a shot.

The exotic instruments and Richey's mellow, soothing, Johnny Cash-country meets Jack Johnson-surfer-boy voice, complement each other perfectly and make for one killer album that clocks in at nearly an hour long.

Am I alone in thinking that screaming into a microphone at obscene levels doesn't constitute music?

Reach the reporter at erika.wurst@asu.edu.

Bingo - The Cicada and Other Stories (CD, Cravedog, Americana/acoustic pop)
If you like Ron Sexsmith...there's a good chance you will enjoy the smooth genuine sounds of Bingo. If there is one word to describe this album, it most certainly is "unpretentious." The Cicada and Other Stories (Bingo's third full-length) presents laidback country-influenced compositions that feature exceptional lyrics and wonderfully genuine melodies. The arrangements are simple and straightforward...and the vocals have a slightly sloppy feel that is most appealing. Real music from a real individual. You wouldn't think it would be so difficult to come across such a thing...but it is. Highly rewarding tunes include "The Cicada," "Wishing," "Ghost Woman Blues," and "Candlelight." (Rating: 5)

Bingo – The Cicada and Other Stories
It’s hard for alt-country artists to keep a good reputation these days with hipsters like Ryan Adams letting his Hollywood starlet girlfriend provide guest vocals, but Kevin “Bingo” Richey is taking things back to their roots. Even if you don’t particularly care for the lap steel and twang, Bingo (Richey along with twelve other members rotating on instruments) makes it difficult not to want to lend both ears and all of your attention for the record’s entirety. All ten tracks are ear candy for the alt-country set, but the real booty is in “Luciagua” – which ignores the twangy tempo of all the other tracks with a slow, sad-tempered salsa/flamenco. He might look like everyone’s aging Deadhead uncle, but his ability to make sad stories sound that good makes it easy to take him seriously.
-Brandy Voiles

BINGO
the cicada and other stories
(Cravedog)
The last time I heard Bingo (AKA Kevin Richey), he was blazing a singularly unique East Indian Americana trail, with banjos, sitars and psychedelia sharing space comfortably. On his third record, he sticks to more conventional country ballads, straightforward and heartfelt. I find myself wishing for more eccentricity (though the Middle Eastern drone returns on the final track "Candlelight"), but he's a good singer and songwriter, and it's impossible to deny jewels like "The Cicada," "Proud Eagle" and the mournful "God, What Am I Doing Here." Michael Toland

Bingo • The Cicada and Other Stories • Cravedog Records • Bingo's third solo release carries on that folk tradition that draws from his vast influences of psychedelic, hard rock, jazz and country music. His carefree nature, positive outlook on life and peaceful demeanor spills onto this disc in songs like "Luciagua." Pulling from the darkest psyche of a human, Bingo proves that the worst times can bring the best out of someone. This in-depth journey is an introspective look inside of a man's fragile soul. (JC)

Title:
Bingo - Cicada And Other Stories
Description:
Wandering troubadour Kevin Richey (aka Bingo, ex-Golden Delicious) has honed his sound, characterized by wide open space and intimate vocalization, on his third effort. His modern folk songs dip into everything from prairie traditionals to Eastern instrumentation - though not as directly as on 1998's H'Om, these influences do seep in to the dirge of strings on "Salbar O Fallar" and the raga of epic closer "Candlelight". Bingo explores more traditional country-folk atmospheres with equal elaboration and style, as on "God, What Am I Doing Here", making tapestries of pedal and lap steel, trumpet, harmonica, strings and an array of keys. This earnest singer-songwriter's work seems to resonate forth as the sound of its namesake the Cicada does from the trees. (Cravedog)

Bingo - Cicada And Other Stories

Bingo Artist Resources
Try if you like -
Mark Lanegan, Greg Brown
Buy Bingo CDs at Insound!
Bingo is a fairly new artist with Cicada and Other Stories being Bingo's third album. Bingo (Kevin Richey) takes folk music and molds it into his own creation. There are some bits on this album that sounds familiar but for the most part you can expect new things from Bingo. He is able to conjure up some fairly interesting arrangements and songs. I found it hard not to listen to the whole album once I had started a listen. Cicada just demands your attention, not using force but by promising greater things upon closer listening. There are times when Bingo sounds a little like Mark Lanegan. The albums leaves us with a beautiful lullaby in the form of "Candlelight". It's a gentle reminder of how a simple song can ease us of the day's stresses. It's not a quick song, instead going on for about 11 minutes. Cicada and Other Stories is not an immediate album but grows on you with each repetition. I would expect that Bingo would be a huge draw at various folk festivals.
(Cravedog 2003)
Reviewed on 2004-03-15 13:26:50 by Dennis Scanland

Bingo: The Cicada and Other Stories (Cravedog Records)

Plucked from the slush pile, a CD called The Cicada & Other Stories by a musician or musicians called Bingo inspires little if any confidence, suggesting emetic levels of affectation. It comes as a pleasant surprise, then, to discover that the CD in question by the (singular) musician in question charms in ways almost wholly unanticipated.

“Ghost Woman Blues,” the seventh of ten tracks here, features a burst of yodeling, for instance, and no self-respecting latter-day flower-power type would so debase himself. On the title song, moreover, Bingo wisely downplays the metaphor at the heart of the lyric, and if he goes all “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” on Track 9, “Twinkle Twinkle,” it fails to provoke a psychotic fugue precisely to the extent that Bingo, unlike Simon & Garfunkel, sounds nothing like a choirboy emeritus.

Indeed, on “Proud Eagle,” he sounds like no one so much as the Lizard King himself, Jim Morrison; to boot, that track constitutes an in-your-face protest song reminiscent of (say) Marty Balin at his most endearingly vexed, accompanied by a satisfactorily bluesy guitar. In that regard, as a matter of fact, Bingo excels on The Cicada and Other Stories with an array of instruments in a range of styles, perhaps predictably—in the late ’90s, according to a smidgen of research, he belonged to Golden Delicious, a noted Oregon quintet.

An unexpectedly engaging disc, this. Give it a spin.—Bryan A. Hollerbach

Bingo – The Cicada & Other Stories (Cravedog) this excellent new album from Kevin Richey of Golden Delicious and The Freak Mountain Ramblers is a perfect night-drive album, tenderly psychedelic with slow and bluesy folk drifts layered with tango Tex-Mex trumpet and dark lyrics

BINGO
THE CICADA AND OTHER STORIES
CRAVEDOG RECORDS
It has been a while since folk was tastefully done, but this gent Bingo comes pretty damn close. With audible elements of Kenny Wayne Shepard, Neil Young, and Mariachi, Bingo layers a pretty thick mixture of folk sensibility. The songs starkly contrast each other, going from mixing horns and steel drum on "Luciagua" to resonator and harmonica on "Wishing". The producer of the record leans pretty heavily on the vocals, however, which is disappointing considering the intricacy of the back-up tracks. At any rate, Bingo is alright, and THE CICADA AND OTHER STORIES will stay in my player for a while.
-AC Lerok

Bingo / The Cicada And Other Stories / Cravedog (www.cravedog.com)

Het openingsnummer The Cicada van het album The Cicada And Other Stories van Bingo (Joshua Tree, CA) doet ontegenzeglijk vermoeden dat we hier van doen hebben met onbekende opnames van J.W. Roy. Zowel de sfeer van het country-achtige nummer als de manier van zingen van frontman Kevin ‘Bingo’ Richey vertonen sterke gelijkenis met het werk van deze Brabantse slagerszoon. Maar daarmee houdt de vergelijking met Neerlands trots snel op. Hoewel, ook de rest van het materiaal van Bingo vertoont bij vlagen wel een hoog keukentafel bluesgehalte. Maar waar JW bij de platenboer in het bakje ‘singer-songwriter’ of ‘roots’ belandt, zal The Cicada And Other Stories veeleer onder ‘country/folk’ worden geplaatst. Bingo maakt (ingetogen, soms zelfs swampy) sfeermuziek, die zowel op de Belgische als Nederlandse radio hooguit aan bod komt op momenten waarop het gros der mensheid in ruste is. Met Kevin Richey heeft de groep een goede, met een prettige baritonstem gezegende bandleider. Een goeie songsmid ook, die vroeger waarschijnlijk veel heeft geluisterd naar onder andere Little Feat (vergelijk Proud Eagle), The Doors (vergelijk het lang uitsponnen, lichtelijk psychedelisch en freaky Twinkle Twinkle) en naar Randy Newman (Wishing). Kritische noot: de vormgever van Bingo heeft soms de neiging enigszins weirde teksten te schrijven (‘Í wish I was a cat, so I’d know where it’s at’) maar gelukkig is dat uiteindelijk nergens écht storend. Conclusie: dit derde album van Bingo is een alleszins aangenaam muzikaal behang met een caleidoscopisch motief. Bij uitstek geschikt voor de late avond. (JVDB)

...and here it is translated into english by tranexp.com:

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Bingo is or was the side project of Kevin Richey and The Cicada and Other Stories is his third and most compelling work. 1999's H-Om melded Appalachia with eastern influences. 2001's Ad Astra Per Aspera for the most part was simple backwoods folk. On The Cicada, he melds all of the aforementioned with concise pop eccentricities. On "Lutiagua," Bingo molds heartbreaking folk with Caribbean flavor--the only thing it lacks is a steel drum. On "Proud Eagle," Bingo provides a nice little blues romp that might make Mr. Dylan proud. Nevertheless, when he forays into campfire country on "Ghost Woman Blues," it's more of a miss than anything. All in all, Bingo has set the chips in a straight line and The Cicada and Other Stories wins either $50 or a handmade quilt for those cold and lonely nights around the campfire.
-- Frank Jones

“Well, I was working with this guy named Jefferey Frederick doing gigs up in Oregon. This one gig I did, I went and worked with his band. It was an April Fool's Day party for the Gypsy Jokers, which is a motorcycle club up there.”
In his gentle drawl, Kevin Richey is telling the tale of how he got his nickname.
“We got to playing and I knew all the riffs, and Jeff pointed at me and said, ‘Bingo.'
“And it stuck.”
With his faded shirt, cowboy hat and slow Kansas vowels, Bingo would look at home driving a beat-up pickup truck through fields of corn. Instead, he's at home in a little neighborhood in Joshua Tree, playing with his dream band.
Bingo's Dream Band began with Bingo's finding a job playing for gas money at Star's Way Out, a bar about 30 miles east of downtown Twentynine Palms. From his work there, he was invited to play on a radio show called “Metal Lab.” He told them his songs were more folk than metal, “but the guy said, ‘That's cool.'”

In the studio, he met bass player Tony Mason. He was wearing a Europa shirt with a picture of the Buddha on it, so Bingo thought, “That cat's pretty cool.”
Willis Ubben, neighbor and fan, declares of Mason, “He can make that bass talk!”
Mason helped Bingo get a job at Rancho de la Luna, the Joshua Tree recording studio, and the two began to collaborate.
They picked up more players, and everything just clicked for Bingo.


“Around here, Ray Woods plays with us. He's a drummer of note who lives in these parts.”
There's Jesse Sparrow, with whom Bingo used to play in bluegrass bands.
Cousin Lewi Longmire is a guitarist with a band. “I think the Telecaster was invented for him.”
And Bingo's dream band came true.
“I've been playing in bands since I was a kid and I finally got the band I dreamed of, where everyone gets along and there's no gigantic egos.”
Ask him for the band's musical influences, and he fondly names a list of styles: blues, jazz, folk, rock, jug bands·.
“I have an agent in Europe who says it's Transcendental Americana,” he smiles. “I just think it's American music.”
It's more about the songs than the labels to this band. If the songs are good, he says, the band plays them and it sounds right.
--
Touring in America and Europe, they have played locally at Pappy & Harriet's in Pioneertown and Kokopelli's Kantina in Yucca Valley.
There, in a lounge attached to a Mexican Restaurant, they had everyone in the room dancing. “By the end of the night we had the lid all the way off and it was a party,” Bingo says.
The Wichita, Kansas, native learned how to get a crowd going while he was playing in Oregon with Jefferey Frederick and the Clamtones. For a mentor on the subject, it would be hard to find a better one than Frederick, founder of the cult-favorite Clamtones, the best band most people have never heard of.
The corners of Bingo's mouth turn up a little as he remembers the lesson.
“Jefferey told me to look for the gals in the room and if they start to tap their toes, keep playing that music. They'll start to dance, then the guys'll start dancing around them, and everyone will get thirsty and buy beer, and the owner of the place'll invite you back.”
--
Bingo ended up running a record label in Oregon, “documenting these crazy farmers and fishermen who knew songs no one else knows,” when he decided it was time to look for less green pastures.
“I got kind of depressed living in the rain all the time.”
He had visited the Hi-Desert before and loved it, so when he and his old lady at the time were talking over a move to Texas, he said, “No, let's go to Joshua Tree.”
He lived in an apartment in Yucca Valley for a while and came to know Ubben, who owned a rental house in Joshua Tree and had something in the nature of a sewage problem. Bingo, still doing odd jobs, helped Ubben out. It was filthy work, but Bingo loved the property. Ubben figured if Bingo could love the place while he was getting a hands-on experience of its septic tank, he deserved to have it.
Ubben made a good offer and Bingo accepted.
Ubben's pretty happy about the deal: He can sit in his front yard and hear the Dream Band practice.
In addition to the Dream Band, Bingo and his neighbors play in Honky Tonk Train and the Thrift Store All Stars, who appear most every Sunday at Pappy & Harriet's in Pioneertown.
Taking stock of his life, Bingo looks like a man who can't believe his good luck.
“It's a good time,” he smiles. “Lot of talented people out here.”