ALBUM REVIEW: The Cramps – Gravest Gravy

“Nobody fuckin’ stops the tape on the Cramps in the fuckin’ studio”- Lux Interior

The Cramps were arguably the greatest live band of all time, though even devoted fans like myself might not have fully appreciated it at the time. Springing from the mental acid bath imaginings of Lux Interior and Poison Ivy, they were your parents’ worst garage-punk-sci-fi-monster-movie-switchblade-wielding-Addams-Family-irresponsibilly nightmare. A demented, smoking test tube full of troglodyte drums, slashing guitars and the stuttering, hiccupping, yelping, lascivious vocals of Lux, who was almost certainly clad in just spray-on PVC trousers and a leering smile. I once saw him balance atop an amp stack, drinking champagne from Ivy’s stiletto with one hand, pulling down his trousers with the other. See? Greatest live band of all time. You just don’t get that with Coldplay.

Gravest Gravy is the result of someone recently rediscovering some reel-to-reel tapes in Ivy’s garage (she withdrew from the public eye after Lux’s death in 2009). The tapes were of the band’s debut sessions in Ardent Studios, Memphis, back in 1977. Alex Chilton – the magnificent frontman of The Box Tops and the wasted, doomed Big Star – was typically messed up but somehow got the band to record everything they had. Some of these recordings surfaced on the Gravest Hits EP, other songs appeared in new, slightly more polished forms on subsequent releases. The rest of the recordings languished in the garage, nearly reissued a couple of times, till they reappeared recently. This time, someone smart called in Henry Rollins and Ian McKaye – the Chuckle Brothers of punk, the nerdiest record collectors of all – and once they got involved, you knew something would happen. That something is this stunning, raw-as-fuck twelve-track reissue (and a full reissue campaign to follow on the revived Vengeance Records).

The Cramps were famously voracious record collectors and had a knack for perverting old rockabilly and garage songs to their twisted ends – here, there’s Roy Orbison’s Domino, Ronnie Dawson’s Rockin’ Bones, I Can’t Stand it By Charlie Feathers, Rocket In My Pocket by Jimmy Lloyd among others – while the originals were often blatant rewrites of other esoteric bangers. But once the band got hold of a song, it ended up sounding like nothing but The Cramps. And they rarely sounded this sparse, this possessed, this hungry again. This is lustful, grinding, primitive beat music: the scraped, tortured guitar on opener TV Set still sounds like the punkest thing ever, and this all-timer has everything that made The Cramps sound so special crammed into three minutes of snarl, libido, threat, sweat and abandon. If you’re already a fan, this is an essential rediscovery. If you’re not, keep playing this until you are.