Bergmann finds straightforward venom in the dregs

The Gazette (Montreal)
Saturday, April 28, 1990
By Mark Lepage

Art Bergmann
Sexual Roulette
Duke Street

There's a drunkard, a wife-beater or a psycho on every big-city street, and Vancouver's Art Bergmann writes and sings as if he's met them all - and liked them.

Bergmann only sounds like a certifiable rock 'n' roll Section Eight. Sexual Roulette, his second album, is a punishing, scabrous journey through the dregs of humanity. It also happens to rock with a fearsome intensity.

Sexual Roulette is Barfly committed to vinyl, a cautionary tale for the '90s that celebrates its own ugliness. Bergmann picks at emotional and psychic scabs with a neurotic's obsessive glee, alternately wallowing, raging and howling at the moon.

He starts with a savaging of rock 'n' roll itself in Bound For Vegas. Set to brutal music, the lyric revels in the seamy fat-Elvis underside of rock careerism, all the while pounding the message home with straightforward venom: "I'm a never was / trying to be a has-been."

The catalogue of grotesqueries includes AIDS, madness, suicide, assault, racism and drug addiction. But the record is worthwhile for Bergmann's guitar alone. It's an unrepentant grunge-machine fused from the shards of every great punk 'n' roll band of the last 20 years, back to the Stooges and the Velvet Underground.

Through it all, through the churning riffs in Bar of Pain, the primal scream of the title track, and the black humor of The Hospital Song ("Maybe later / we'll get together / and have a relapse"), Bergmann sounds apocalyptically angry.

"I'd rather straddle / this razorblade / than sit on that fence," he asserts in the grinding Gambol. Bergmann is out on a precarious limb, notably in the merciless Dirge No. 1, but he sings and plays as though his life were at stake.