QUINTRON & MISS PUSSYCAT - Swamp Tech

It's always difficult to get a handle on a Quintron album, whether it's

because the old fox has accustomed us to fragmentary, improbable works, like the

masterful "Satan Is Dead", or terrifying, unapproachable noise raids,

like his percussive debut "Internal Feedback 001-011", or because time and

again his taste for the bizarre, for an eccentric, mutant sound, and his

tendency toward musical deconstruction, have permeated even the most

tame (for example, the famous "Are You Ready For An Organ Solo?") in his

discography.

But let's take a step back: who exactly is this Mr.

Quintron? Jay Poggi, his real name, is one of the wildest characters

on New Orleans' variegated, multicolored underground scene; an antiquarian

organist in love with the graceless timbre of unlikely instruments (often

third-rate gear, or even toys) and arcane contraptions, a manic inventor (among

his patents are the spit machine, a drum machine that runs

exclusively on human saliva, and the famous drum buddy, which uses a

system of mirrors that turn light into sound), a devotee of a kind of

lumpy, playful proto-garage built on keyboards, he has built a career

studded with colossal oddities and torrential flows of unbridled genius,

winning over the hearts of the shrewdest listeners and the amused praise of

the most attentive critics. So expectations, before hitting "play", are very

high.

It's a real shame, after several listens, to realize just how much these

were let down: a lot has changed in the Quintron camp since the days

of the last, hallucinated "The Frog Tape". Miss Pussycat, life and

artistic partner of our hero, is increasingly pushing her way out of her

flamboyant puppet theatre and into the content of the musical output of

the Quintron project, bringing her croaky voice to the forefront in

numerous tracks.

But for the most devoted fan, the real shock lies elsewhere:

this is an album made up entirely of songs (with the exception of the

comic interlude "Tea Time"), whereas the dominant format on the old

records was the instrumental. This evolution, already begun with "Are You

Ready", is here taken to its extreme: it is, as we said, an album of

songs. And mediocre songs at that, propped up by an organ duller than usual that

only rarely ("Shoplifters") flares up into the sharp flashes of mad

inventiveness we've come to expect.

The impression, on first listen, is that the

tracks all sound the same. Later, more attentive listeners might discover the

unrestrained, phosphorescent dance of “Witch In The Club”, or perhaps the relentless

pulse of “Fly Like A Rat”, literally a rave in a swamp, propped up by

a monotonous electronic drumbeat, but engaging nonetheless (if you can

stomach Miss Pussycat's screeching, of course). As for the rest, it's genuinely

hard to salvage anything: there are concessions to the clumsiest, most vulgar

easy listening (“Dream Captains”), pointless and laughable electronic tribalism, seasoned

with the usual (by now stale) drum buddy (“Swamp Buggy Badass”), nonsensical

interludes that aren't funny (“Squirrel Gardens”), and tracks that simply

taste of nothing at all (“Chatterbox”, “Love Is Like A Blob”, the cover of “God Of

Thunder” by Kiss).

It really does seem that Mr. Quintron's season is

drawing to a close, if, less than ten years after “Satan Is Dead”, this flavorless and

utterly insipid mimicry of r&b is all he can muster.

Ride the wave of great music

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30/04/2026