Album Review: Pierre Omer's Swing Revue – Tropical Breakdown (Voodoo Rhythm Records)

Tropical Breakdown wears its tuxedo with a knife under the cummerbund. Pierre Omer's Swing Revue play swing the way it stumbles through a fever dream after too many drinks. If swing once meant parties in sepia-toned ballrooms, Tropical Breakdown, the group's second album after 2016's Swing Cremona, plays it as if whispered from under a bar stool. It's dance music for end times. Or, for no times at all. Just make sure, when that day comes, you're with the Swing Revue in a rum-soaked tango club, roadside circus, backroom jazz den, or imaginary speakeasy. On May 14, that venue will be Control Club as Pierre Omer's Swing Revue bring their genre-twisting swing to Bucharest.

Best known for his work with Switzerland's legendary funeral rock'n'roll ensemble, The Dead Brothers, Omer has always trafficked in the uncanny spaces between old-world jazz and outsider rock. But with the Swing Revue, formed in 2013, he sharpens the silhouette as four sharply dressed musicians conjuring up dance hall decadence, noir jazz, and offbeat exotica, stitched together with the growl of a garage band. Performing in matching black suits and bowties, they resemble characters in a lost Visconti film. Omer calls his band his "Quatuor du Hot Club de Suisse," a nod to the gypsy-jazz ensemble of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli.

The album opens with Atomic Swing, a lurching, mutated street parade. Omer name-checks Jo Privat and then detonates the reference as homage and threat. The melody wanders into Balkan scales before being flattened under a fuzzed-out guitar riff. Julien Israelian's drums pop like a pistol behind the curtain, while Géraldine Schenkel's Rhodes piano sounds like it's plugged into a dying neon sign. Christoph Gantert's trumpet rises mournfully and manically. All the while, the entire album is spiked with whistles and clatter from toy instruments that lend a carnivalesque menace. These guys are swinging, but they're also living hard.

The album’s title track, Tropical Breakdown, exemplifies this aesthetic. It begins with a slinky calypso rhythm and Omer's half-spoken croon about a "cheesy smile" and a "guilty heart" caught in a tropical meltdown. The beat recalls Belafonte, but the lyrics are modern and world-weary: "It's the tropical breakdown," Omer repeats, as if referring to an impending social collapse.

It Doesn't Sound (The Way It Should) could be the record's thesis: things falling apart, misaligned beauty, and the compulsion to keep going anyway. "Captain Beefheart in Hong Kong," Omer hallucinogenically mutters at one point with a wink from a doomed lounge singer who's read too much Pynchon.

Schenkel's role is crucial. Her keyboard work does the job of a bass player but also colors the air around the songs, giving the whole record a glint of oil-slick funk. She adds clavinet and bandoneón on several tracks, lending a feel of faded tango through some dusty backstreet of a non-existent Buenos Aires.

When the band turns to covers, they're not playing tribute but repurposing. L'amour à la plage becomes a slow dissolve through the ruins of a holiday gone wrong. It's campy, but it aches. On Just One Kiss, he barely touches the melody. The song, a reworking of a Cure track, dissolves into a heartbreaking whisper. It's less goth than ghost.

Not everything here is dark. Lyrically, the album moves between absurdity and dread. While the arrangements evoke 1930s Paris or 1950s Havana, the songs are contemporary, even anxious. Leslie Kong, a tribute to the Jamaican producer who worked with Desmond Dekker and Derrick Morgan, is a strange little history lesson set to a shuffle that flirts with ska, swing, and roots reggae. But even the joyful rhythms feel haunted. The smile is there, but something's twitching behind the eyes.

But the heart of Tropical Breakdown isn't its references. It's the constant sense that something's slightly off-kilter. You're never quite sure if the song's about to fall apart or come together. Swing becomes an unstable condition of structured collapse. It's hard to dance to, but you still want to try.

Much of Tropical Breakdown feels like Tom Waits staged a Brechtian musical in a bombed-out Havana nightclub. But nothing feels theatrical for its own sake. The band's discipline is rooted in the conviction of people who are in on the joke but still mean every word. It's easy to imagine these songs underscoring a Lynchian Roadhouse sequence or a dream sequence in a Tarantino film left on the cutting room floor.

By the final track, Swing Street, the groove is still intact, and the instruments glint under low light, but the emotional residue is thick. There's joy in this record, but it's the kind that doesn't pretend to know the end is coming. The beat keeps going anyway.

Tropical Breakdown is a record committed to its own contradictions. It is vintage and modern, silly and sad, tight and chaotic. It's a crooked love letter to the past written in the handwriting of the present, signed with a kiss and a bruise. It reminds us that swing was always wild before it was clean, always a little dangerous before it became polite. And in Omer's hands, it's dangerous again.