Unearthed vault recordings of The Cramps are a cause for gleeful galivanting, particularly when the sounds are of the vintage captured on Gravest Gravy, which is out now on vinyl, compact disc, and digital through Vengeance Records. The album delivers a dozen buzzy, fuzzy, thumping belters guided by the mighty hand of Alex Chilton in Memphis, Tennessee. Anybody interested in hearing uncut American greatness at its most frenzied should step right the fuck up.
In part through sheer commitment to an ideal of crazed trash-worshipping flamboyance, The Cramps have endured as one of the most beloved of all punk bands. Punk? Yes, it’s easy (and for some, preferable) to come up with a hyphen-laden genre descriptor to differentiate from standard, straightforward punk rock what singer Lux Interior, guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschach, and whoever spun through the revolving door to occupy the roles of third and occasionally fourth member, were up to.
The reality is that The Cramps date back to the days before punk became a largely codified stylistic experience. All a band needed during this initial burst of punkish activity was a loose handle on either inspired mayhem or savvy simplicity. Across the decades since then, a handful of the more unorthodox early punk bands have been awarded foundational post-punk status, but that doesn’t work for the scuzzy and sweaty roots junk of The Cramps.
Instead, Lux and Ivy and crew luxuriate in the same neighborhood as X, The Gun Club, The Blasters, The Flesh Eaters, Girl Trouble, Flat Duo Jets, Jon Spencer and the assorted bands of Ohioans Don Howland and Jeffrey Evans. It’s difficult to imagine labels like Norton, Crypt, and Estrus existing without The Cramps pointing backward with one hand and forward with the other.
A rampant aftereffect of the post-punk era was a compulsive need for grouping into styles, but the bands in the above paragraph transcended categories, and The Cramps might’ve had the widest reach of all. Goths loved them, so did the hardcore crowd, and they were once a fixture on college radio. Gravest Gravy delivers a strong dose of what was so cathartically necessary about the band. If it’s not the freshly excavated apex of their discography, it surely belongs on the list of the essential recordings.
Guitarist Bryan Gregory and drummer Nick Knox complete a lineup that can bang out some Nuggets-style garage punk and then swing without a hitch into the humidly swampy. However, the core of The Cramps’ sound is rockabilly at its most violently hiccoughing and decorum-defiant.
Consciously but not calculatedly unrefined, The Cramps’ undying emphasis was on extending the stoopid-doopid essence of early Rock & Roll as a secret handshake that leaves squares eternally perplexed while simultaneously capturing countless legions of converts. Lux and Ivy truly were two of the greatest, indeed the gravest, to ever do it.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
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