ALBUM REVIEW: Swamp Dogg Stays True to Own Sound on ‘I Need a Job … So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune’
Grant Britt
Posted On February 22, 2022
The last thing Swamp Dogg needs is Auto-Tune. The Dogg has enough power and bombast on his own to get him out of any vocal situation that should arise. And who really gives a damn if he’s in tune or not? He’s always in the neighborhood, note-ably speaking. His cheek-in-jowl plea here falls on deaf ears, fan-wise. Folks tune in to hear the Dogg do what he always does — entertain — and once again, he doesn’t disappoint.
Fed up with being cheated on royalties and passed over for recognition after writing hits in the 1960s for artists including Patti LaBelle, Jerry Williams unleashed his new hound persona on 1970’s yike–a-delic masterpiece Total Destruction to Your Mind. The Dogg allowed Williams to whip up a stew of acid-laced genres basted with a wicked sense of humor. “I wanted to sing about everything and anything and not be pigeonholed by the industry,” Williams said in the liner notes for 1995’s Best of 25 Years of Swamp Dogg. “I came up with the name Dogg because a dog can do anything, and anything a dog does never comes as a real surprise.”
The Dogg has held on to that promise on his latest outing, I Need a Job … So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune. There’s no detectable Auto-Tune on the record, just the Dawg’s soulful, sardonic reflections on living life Dawg-y style.
The title cut isn’t a plea for vocal crutches, just a hard look at a man in desperate times willing to take any job he can get to get by. It’s a remarkably straightforward presentation for Dogg. Over a funky rollicking backbeat, Dogg howls about his bare feedbowl situation: “Gimme some work / I ain’t too proud to beg / Don’t care what I do / Gotta take some money home so I can pull my family thru / I need a job.”
“Cheatin’ in the Daylight” is the stuff Dogg does best, lowdown deep-dish soul with a ’60s feel. But in typical Dogg fashion, things aren’t quite on the level. The harmony on this reworked cut from a 2011 collab with R&B legend Willie Clayton is a bit out of synch, setting up a schizophrenic, psychedelic twist to the vocals.
“Soul to Blessed Soul” channels a Curtis Mayfield feel with a nod to the Staples’ “Let’s Do It Again,” gospel-drenched soul Dogg dedicates to “my friend / my lover / my significant other.”
The 79-year-old shows he’s still got plenty of stamina on his frenetic cover of the brassy 1968 Joe Tex classic “Show Me.”
He may talk about learning new tricks, but to his fans’ great relief, the same old Dogg comes out to play when the call goes out on a whistle only he can hear.
