Swamp Dogg

★★★ I Need A Job… So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune DON GIOVANNI. CD/DL/LP

Cult soul man’s gazillionth genre-bending album.

It seems 79-year-old iconoclast Swamp Dogg has finally been caught in a Catch 22. Obviously, a followup to 2018’s Love, Loss And

Auto-Tune, so many of these new songs are drenched in the pitch-altering software that it’s impossible to know whether his fixation is born of despair or fascination. Like the laterlife albums of many artists, the worldly experience Dogg brings to love ballad Soul To Blessed Soul and other tracks gives them a moral weight that can’t be faked. From the deep soul of She Got That Fire to I Need Your Body’s freaky funk, Dogg runs the gamut of his career, and if it wasn’t for a heavy hand on the pitch button, Cheating All Over Again could be as great as Curtis Mayfield’s final recordings. Too often, however, it’s just too hard to get past that artificially wobbly voice.