Some years ago, my shithead friends and I came up with a pejorative for a certain kind of top-hat-wearing, scat-talking, cemetery-lingering, accordion-playing raconteurs who are often found busking on street corners, singing songs about train hoppers, bayou ghosts, or whatever knock off voodoo magic pops into their skulls or that they managed to crib from numerous Tom Waits or Dr. John songs. We called guys like this “Mr. Spooky Pants” and, while I concede this appellation isn’t especially clever, it does conjure a certain image in one’s mind.
Mr. Spooky Pants’s natural habitat is, of course, Louisiana, most commonly New Orleans, but he can be found in other areas like French Canada, specifically Montreal, and researchers have linked his DNA to Strasbourg, France, and various other sites of European whimsy.
You may be wondering why I’ve taken you down this particular taxonomic road, so I’ll tell you. It’s to report that Twisted Teens—a group that hails from the aforementioned New Orleans- and their new record ‘Florida Water Blues‘ have found the sweet spot between Mr. Spooky Pants’s proclivities and a Jay Reatar-esque punk rock sensibility, sculpting a sound that is both familiar and unique, which is more or less the high-water mark of artistic success these days. The record is swampy and soulful while still rocking hard enough to help you shake off the hangover after a night of drinking frozen daiquiris out of a gallon milk jug or wrestling alligators or whatever else it is they do down in the bayou. There’s also a nice sonic contrast between the outrageous drum machine sound (at least I think it’s all drum machine) and the deeply organic tones coming through in the rest of the mix. Moreover, the record is infused with tuneful melodies throughout and, to use a highly technical term, their singer has a very “cool voice.”
Anyway, as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to appreciate Mr. Spooky Pants and his ilk and realized there is a time and a place to get weird and walk through a graveyard with a skeleton on your shoulder and a dead canary in your top hat. If you, dear reader, decide to take such a voyage without signing away your rock and roll soul, you couldn’t ask for a better soundtrack than ‘Florida Water Blues‘.
Links of interest:
https://www.instagram.com/twistedteensneworleans/
https://twistedteens.bandcamp.com/album/florida-water-blues