[1] Unlike other bands with a more ironic take on the lounge scene, Combustible Edison took the music seriously and strove to add to what its members saw as a canon of works by Esquivel, Henry Mancini and Martin Denny.
Said Trouser Press, "As the band that poured the first shot in the Cocktail Revolution, this Providence combo brought lounge music into the '90s—or, more accurately, transported tastemakers back to the suburbia of the '50s—with strikingly authentic interpretations of some of the most unauthentic sounds known to mankind.
In 1991, Michael Cudahy — now re-dubbed "The Millionaire" by fellow Providence bon vivant Robert Jaz — wrote a stage show titled "The Tiki Wonder Hour", and formed the 14-piece Combustible Edison 'Heliotropic Oriental Mambo and Foxtrot Orchestra' to accompany the performance.
[1] A live review by Los Angeles Times critic Chuck Crisafulli noted that the album "perfectly duplicates the '50s cool and hi-fi exotica of such lounge icons as Martin Denny",[5] while Trouser Press said, "I, Swinger is a faithful replication of bargain-bin exotica, right down to a sleeve festooned with cocktail recipes and calculatedly dated hep-cat liner notes".
[1] During this period, Dixon was replaced by keyboardist Robert "Brother Cleve" Toomey, a former WMBR DJ who was previously a member of the Swinging Erudites, the Del Fuegos, the Fabulous Billygoons, and Barrence Whitfield & the Savages.
[8][9] By the time of Combustible Edison's final album, The Impossible World (1998),[1] drummer Michael "Laughing Boy" Connors had replaced Oppenheimer, and they had incorporated more modern electronic elements.