Swamp Tech/Electric Swamp

They Say...

Review by Heather Phares, All Music Guide

Picking up and expanding on where Are You Ready for an Organ Solo? left off, Quintron and Miss Pussycat's CD/DVD set Swamp Tech/Electric Swamp once again shows how easily the duo mixes subterranean, subculture trashiness with an almost childlike innocence. Recorded live directly to a two-track recorder, Swamp Tech boasts some of Quintron's most raucous-yet-danceable songs yet, including the bouncy "Witch in the Club" and "Swamp Buggy Baddass," a percolating rave-up that celebrates the badass in everyone, as well as Quintron's souped-up organ. Meanwhile, a cover of Kiss' "God of Thunder" sounds like an electrical storm set to a dance beat in Quintron's hands. Then again, quietly off-kilter interludes like "Squirrel Gardens" and "Tea Time" are just as distinctively Quintron as the album's louder tracks are. Miss Pussycat's sweet-and-sour vocals and percussion contributions are even more tightly integrated into the overall sound and feel of Swamp Tech than they were on The Unmasked Organ Light-Year of Infinity Man and Are You Ready for an Organ Solo?: along with plenty of witty background vocals throughout the album, she takes the lead on "Fly Like a Rat" -- which also quotes the theme song from The Jeffersons -- and on the rousing closing track, "Love Is Like a Blob." Quintron and Pussycat's fun, free-flowing creativity and passion for music are also emblematic of their hometown, New Orleans, and Swamp Tech/Electric Swamp is full of Big Easy personality. "Shoplifter" revolves around shopping (legal and otherwise) on Canal Street, while "French Quarter Faggot" celebrates being a freak with defiance and decadence. Miss Pussycat's charming "Electric Swamp" movie captures the spirit of New Orleans in more surreal terms: the film looks and sounds like a counterculture kids' puppet show, and revolves around the adventures of Cinnamon the Alligator, whose Sno-Ball stand is destroyed by a swarm of hungry Formosan termites. She and her friend Lolly Crawfish draft the help of a sea captain and Ernie K-Doe and his wife Antoinette to stop the infestation that is quickly munching away at the city. The way the termites flatten the swamp and the useless (and sometimes worse) contracts Cinnamon, Lolly, and the K-Does have with the exterminators seem to foreshadow, if only slightly, the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina; on the other hand, when Ernie K-Doe gets some of the termites to play in his backing band, it feels like a very New Orleans way of making the best of things, in the best way possible.