Cramps

Call it voodoobilly or psychobilly, whatever you like, but the substance of what the Cramps invented in the late '70s with the release of "Songs The Lord Taught Us", their debut album produced by Alex Chilton of Big Star, doesn't change: the legacy and dictates of '50s rockabilly and the echoes of Sixties surf and garage, filtered through the brutality and creativity of the punk and new wave revolution they themselves were living through.

An atypical band, the Cramps. Like the Doors, they managed without a bassist, but unlike Jim Morrison's group they were technically dreadful, lacking a brilliant keyboardist like Ray Manzarek to bind drums and guitars together. This explains why the Cramps' songs are primitive suburban rites, postmodern initiation dances, hymns to metropolitan alienation.

Yet the Cramps never seem to take themselves seriously. Their peculiar taste for mockery and parody sets them light years apart from the theatre of cruelty staged by bands like Virgin Prunes or Christian Death. The Cramps have no intellectual, philosophical or artistic pretensions: they're not playing the part of crude, uncouth types posing that way in protest against capitalist society. The Cramps genuinely can't play.

Their utter detachment from any avant-garde reference is also evident in the two elements underpinning their poetics: white rock 'n' roll and B-movie horror films. Their New York is a ghost town populated by aliens, human refuse, cranks, psychopaths, junkies, zombies, werewolves and vampires. The uncouth bard of this population of darkness is the lurid jester Lux Interior, backed by two psychotic guitarists, former porn actress Poison Ivy and the mysterious Brian Gregory, and by the ravenous drummer Nick Knox.

And it's Knox's primitive drums that kick off the voodoo rite of dissonance in "TV Set", with stinging guitar riffs and Interior's possessed, raucous vocals. The album continues with a spasmodic cover of Jimmy Stewart's "Rock On The Moon", and with the jagged, roaming "Garbageman".

"I Was A Teenage Werewolf" is one of their masterpieces: a parade of werewolves on the stage of New York's suburbs, marked by animalistic drumbeats, horror-movie guitar cadences and Lux Interior's psychotic howls. The noise-laden spell of "Sunglasses After Dark" is another peak of their degenerate shows.

The ode to madness that is "Mad Daddy", with Interior's asylum-worthy screams, and the almost Stooges-like fury of "Mistery Plane" pave the way for the paroxysmal "Zombie Dance", whose title already says it all: fun and vicious punk, with effects somewhere between splatter horror and slapstick comedy.

The record keeps moving through neurotic, propulsive dances: the pneumatic drive of "What's Behind The Mask", the sulphurous cover of the Sonics' "Strychnine", and the goofy jest of "I'm Cramped".

The dancefloors of the '50s keep on bleeding in "Tear It Up", while "Fever" closes the record with its hazy, subtly erotic, finely noir atmosphere.

Violent and ironic, sensual and macabre, the Cramps' music brands itself into the listener's imagination as a curious cross between a Wes Craven horror flick and the infamous parodic romp of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

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07/07/2007