Pierre Omer

Album reviews:

2009: See What’s Hidden

2010: Do the Gipsy Thing

2011: Beso de novia (Pierre Omer & the Twango Club)

2012: Stewarts Garage Conspiracy

2016: Swing Cremona (Pierre Omer’s Swing Revue)

2020: Time Flies (Pierre Omer & the Nightcruisers)

2023: Tropical Breakdown (Pierre Omer’s Swing Revue)

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See What’s Hidden (2009)

Album: Genre Recommendation, 8/10 | Genre: Singer-Songwriter | Undertones: Blues, Jazz manouche, Contemporary Folk, Musette | Label: Radiogram Records

His past with the blues-rocking psychobilly-garage-funeral band the Dead Brothers would suggest otherwise, but „Dead Pierre“ goes elegantly mellow and melancholic singer-songwriter ways on his debut album. Being a multi-instrumentalist with a knack for folky and bluesy music traditions of the early 20th century and a voice like the smoothest honey-brown cognac, Omer offers anything between musette, pure singer-songwriter folk, classic gypsy swing and little impressionistic pieces that sound as if Erik Satie spent a lot of time with Montmartre-accordeonists („Woland“, „See What’s Hidden“). The album is best though where its generally wistful mood turns to the ominous: „Sea Shells“ and „Black Angel“ are darkly lit, electrified blues cab rides through the night with an almost psychedelic touch – really great stuff. This probably was meant to display Omer’s extreme versatility of musical styles and really portrays him as one of Europe’s best performers and songwriters when it comes to a melting mind of different Euro-American folk styles. That voice sure could lure me straight into a bear pit. I recommend this one as much as anything, but he finds an even more individual, engaging style less dependent on tradition on his confident follow-up Do the Gipsy Thing.

Black angel at my table tonight

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Do the Gipsy Thing (2010)

Album: Genre Recommendation, 8/10 | Genre: Alternative Singer-Songwriter | Undertones: Blues, Jazz manouche, Garage Rock, Contemporary Folk | Label: Radiogram Records

Unshaved and dirty, playful and thirsty

Omer pulls off no small feat here: Showing up as the blueprint of a rugged, charming musical scavenger with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth – and actually managing to tag the audience along. Be it the mischievous stop-and-start-stutter of the title-giving garage rocker (“Because it’s fashionable!”), the nocturnal, bluesy vibraphone-dirge of “The End of the Golden Age” or light-headed little gypsy swing numbers – Omer always seems to hang out the window of a shabby car, inviting you to join the road trip to a land where they play delta blues as well as Balkan polka, where the mornings are for jazz manouche and night time is rung in with the jagged, stomping squall of Suicide’s “Shadazz” – this latter cover version is actually the perfect vehicle demonstrating how Omer can apply his duct-tape-aesthetics even to synth punk, transforming it into a psychobilly rush rivalling the original in groove and poise. Omer’s versatility in genres, song choice and arrangements tend to overshadow one of his bigger assets, his crooning, companionable vocal delivery, but it is clearly what gives this album its character.

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Beso de novia (2011)

Album: Fan Acquisition, 6/10 | Genre: Garage Rock & Gypsy Swing | Undertones: Psychobilly, Beat Poetry, Sound Collage, Avant-Garde Jazz | Recorded: 2008 | Label: Radiogram Records

I had another Spanish beer

Omer mixes his brand of garage-flavoured rockabilly and gypsy jazz up with more bar-brawl-tango and more noise. While the experimental numbers (“Untitled”, the beat-poetry-exercise “The Circus” or the lengthy, ominous “Just Round the Corner”) add a smelly, dark cabaret appeal, their function is atmospheric. Instrumental vignettes like “Toy Tango” or the ‘surf manouche’ of “Orphée” scurry along like wet little creatures in a dirty alley, juxtaposed to pensive, mellow pieces like the always wonderfully dreamy “Charly” or the Italian-folk-flavoured “Maruzzella”. Omer is clearly looking for a sound to fit his various tastes and talents here: With almost a quarter of the run-time being a sort of avant-film-noir-soundtrack, the largely instrumental album’s concept doesn’t quite carry through as it is neither a comfortable listen nor a rowdy danceable affair – it is both of these things and more, but in an on-and-off-manner. The model is really Rain Dogs-era Tom Waits, juiced up with Parisian gypsy aesthetics – cool stuff, especially the closing “Royal Tango”, which goes all out on a brooding main villain theme with scratching guitars and a roaring blues harp.  

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Stewarts Garage Conspiracy (2012)

Album: Genre Recommendation, 8/10 | Genre: Garage Rock, Psychobilly | Undertones: Jazz Manouche, Gypsy Swing | Label: Radiogram Records

One last party shot at the end of the world

Swinging back and forth between jazz manouche and psychobilly, Omer leans slightly heavier towards his garage rock persona here, as the programmatic title indicates. Atmospheric, echoing pieces like “Got My Eyes on You” or the imperatively grooving “Chou Chou” are garage rock in nature – but they swing. The entire album recreates the muffled sound coming out of the coolest rockabilly dancing cave in the neighbourhood, and as Omer perfects what he does best – leaning up to role models like Tom Waits (“Goo Town” is purely from the school of Bone Machine, down to identical percussion), Suicide (in spirit) or the Cramps, but infusing them with the swing of Django Reinhardt or the yearning openness of Hank Williams (a mellow, desert-like “Ramblin‘ Man”), this might very well be his best album. It is by far his most consistent – while he still manages to fuse anything from chanson (“At Night the Sea Is Ours”) to spaghetti western filmscore (“A68”) to swamp blues (“I Wanna Go Home”) into his rockabilly manouche pastiche, a nocturnal, sometimes sweaty, sometimes eerily comforting sound adds a welcome level of coherence. This really should have been a sort of break-out success – another top-notch record.

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Swing Cremona (2016)

Album: Fan Recommendation, 7/10 | Genre: Jazz Manouche, Gypsy Swing | Undertones: Rockabilly | Label: Voodoo Rhythm

Piercing eyes convey a hex to render servile either sex

Ditching his psychobilly approach for once to fully lean into a slightly amplified, sort of ragged and danceable form of swing revival, Omer opts for simple pleasures instead of complicating his usual genre-mélange on the aptly named Swing Cremona. Sure, it’s jiving jazz manouche, with a muted trumpet driving many solos and a laidback electric lead guitar. Joined by two other vocalists on occasions, the Swing Revue lays down bandstand-probed, functional music that remains cheeky and tongue-in-cheek, silly on Louis Armstrong’s calypso send-up “Coconut Island”, knowingly camp on the Arabic quasi-surf rock of “Miserlou” and suave on the 1960s TV-series homage “International Man of Mystery”. It is extremely playable, light-hearted music which comes off as almost provokingly effective – attested by contributions digging deep into the 20^th century entertainment playbook (Berlin, Armstrong, Ellington), treating these songs like the dance nuggets the were and are. Pierre Omer can’t hide his somewhat somber allure behind a thin moustache and the showbiz-bistro façade, and Swing Cremona fits in any place where a good time is more important than the time of day.

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Time Flies (2020)

Album: Genre Recommendation, 8/10 | Genre: Folk Rock / Americana | Undertones: Ambient Americana | Label: Beast Records

I wish I was the cows I see through the window

Open plains are less desolate when enjoyed from the inside of a cozy vehicle going at a steady speed. And focusing on a specific genre as if it were the last roadside snack might be a good approach. After having gone all in with the Swing Revue, Omer chooses to draw from another box of his repertoire yet again: This album, now night-cruising instead of swinging, goes back to pure folk rock and Americana, styles that Omer hadn’t really touched again since his very first albums. It’s not a rustic affair – with its lush, soaring steel guitars and a string section that’s more Viennese saloon than Western swing, the tendency is fortunately more Hazelwood and maybe an ambient, Americanized form of Tindersticks – accompanied by an atmospheric blues harp, Omer sounds comforted and dreamy when he languidly sings about “The Joys of Cruising” and “Driving”, he is anxious to head out on the restless opener “Still That Girl” and sardonically joyous on “Time Flies” or the ‘Summer in the City’-hommage “Rocking NYC” – this is by far his most focused record, just a wonderful set of mellow cello-tinged folk songs about sitting in a car or a roof-top bar, with your mind set on the horizon either way.

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Tropical Breakdown (2023)

Album: Fan Acquisition, 6/10 | Genre: Jazz Manouche, Gypsy Swing | Undertones: Rockabilly | Label: Voodoo Rhythm

Everything always has to be groovy

The second outing of Pierre Omer’s Swing Revue delivers more of the same – but the same is good. Everything always has to be groovy, as the album insists, and as the Swing Revue is basically a live party-and-dance-act serving both the tastes of the Swing Revival and jiving psychobillies, more material means longer dance shows in a gothic re-imagining of Paris in the 1920s. Tropical Breakdown contains cabaret-like mid-tempo numbers with a stress on muted trumpet solos and the ever-present rhythm guitar of jazz manouche, as well as up-tempo jives with a freewheeling and playfully menacing tone (like the title track – or the sneaky, dim-lit “It Doesn’t Sound (the Way It Should”) with the line “it’s funny how things go wrong / so far from where you belong / like Captain Beefheart in Hongkong”, exposing some of the aesthetics at play underneath the cabaret-masquerade. Good stuff as always, but catching the Swing Revue live is the way to go.