Big Bad Voodoo Daddy: Save My Soul : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The late-Nineties neo-swing movement failed, in part, because communicating octogenarian ballroom dancers' beloved music to punk-loving teenagers is a difficult trick. But a perhaps more fundamental reason involves singers -- classic big-band swing had Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, while the recent stuff stars Brian Setzer and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy's one-dimensional Scotty Morris. Save My Soul, the Los Angeles combo's second CD since 1998's breakthrough Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, is a perfectly adequate, occasionally inspired reconstruction of old-school boogie-woogie and jump blues. Twelve years of horn charts have given this Daddy an upbeat tightness that redeems the Dixieland-reviving "Zig Zaggity Woop Woop Pt. 1," the New Orleans march "You Know You're Wrong" and the slinky story-song "Oh Yeah." But ultimately Morris' flat singing can't keep up with the horns, and BBVD winds up swamped in the same sludge that stalled Setzer, Squirrel Nut Zippers and Cherry Poppin' Daddies.

STEVE KNOPPER
(July 8, 2003)