The Cramps – Big Beat From Badsville – Review

The Cramps

Big Beat From Badsville (Epitaph)
by Nik Rainey

You’ve gotta give the Cramps credit: they know their turf. I’ve been out of their EC comics/Big Daddy Roth/Ray Dennis Steckler vortex for a while, and it’s somehow comforting to return and find that they’re still the leering psychobilly swamp monsters they always were, still deep-throating microphones and writhing around to the same strip-club drumbeats and Hazil Adkins-cum-Gerry Roslie guitar riffs in those same putridpools of skunked beer, acid-laced saliva and sex goop. And of course, seeing Poison Ivy striking a threatening pose in one of her Frederick’s of Transylvania get-ups on the sleeve always brings on a warm feeling. (I won’t elaborate on that.)

The question is, do we want comfort from the Cramps? Their name alone suggests the gut-level uneasiness you could always count on them for once upon a midbrain dreary: even now, hearing a prime piece of rancid cheese like “She Said” or “Goo Goo Muck” sends the creepy-crawlies up your spine leaving something disgusting in your unmentionables. Even when they laid solid layers of reverence and parody upon a ballad like Ricky Nelson’s “Lonesome Town,” which for most people would be more than enough, some slimy creature from the id squirmed just underneath, oozing through the cracks in Lux Interior’s voice like the Blob insinuating its way into the projection room of the collective unconscious. These days, the latent has gone blatant – “It Thing Hard-On” and “Queen of Pain” are single-entendres all the way – and the schtick is gettin’ powerful thick, like the fly-encrusted goo on top of an old jug of white lightning. The bio that accompanies preview copies of their Epitaph debut, Big Beat From Badsville, protests a little too much about their authenticity, citing Interior’s drug busts and Ivy’s dominatrix day job (uh… just checking for research’s sake, but do you take walk-ins?), where in days of old, such featherbedding was unnecessary – the music was narcotic and abusive enough. But the stakes are admittedly higher in these days of goat-sacrificing doom-rock and groove-on-this-or-I’ll-pop-a-cap-in-you urban sounds, so a little overreaching for the sake of authenticity is excusable. The good news is that, after several years of wandering through the painted-backdrop wilderness, during which their greatest advance was adding a bass, the Cramps seem to be reconciling their matinee-idle stance with just the right amount of the post-modern world. Sure, that mostly lies in titling a song “Sheena’s in a Goth Gang” and adding a theremin like every other band out there (though, to be fair, that’s surely more of a ’50s sci-fi homage than a Brian Wilson affectation), but it’s a start. And as the album progresses, the tempos get faster, the guitars get greasier, and Lux’s speaking-in-tongue-in-cheek vocals get more manic until, starting with “Wet Nightmare,” they finally make with the overkill the way you dismember them. A belated return to ill form, in terms of both their career and this album, but the Cramps are finally showing signs of a return to rotten health and the prognosis is positively negative for a full relapse.
(2798 Sunset Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90026)