My Review:

The Cramps - Off The Bone

The scribe does not really like to write reviews of compilations, with rare exceptions.

But the one I'm focusing on writing about deserves it because it perfectly represents the early years of this American band. All their terrifying splinters is there, the drives of a duo that was able to synthesize and evolve the rock and roll spirit of the homeland that spawned it. With the ability to force, to go to extremes, to twist the musical path of genres that were getting covered in mould. Impetuosity, passion and a massive listening to unknown productions generated their own developmental dynamics, succeeding in changing the concept that previously connoted it all. The raid into their world defines, triggers and illuminates needs that lead to dazed and cloudy consciousnesses, within a fun that feels floored but which is inevitable.

The Cramps are a slab full of bullets, a murder that saves, in the red and black sea of multiple perversions which however are able to make themselves well liked.

Knowing how to recognize the validity of the proposals of a past that smelled of perfection, getting their hands on it and bringing it into a dimension where nightmares and whiplash unimpeachably become basic elements in which to get lost is their main strength, enveloping and confirming the uniqueness that drives awareness toward benefit: immense.

The songs for The Cramps are identities into which to enter in order not to leave them, a bond that goes beyond style and pleasantness. A whole that makes life an expanded, nourishing, rebellious form where everything has a sense of continuity beyond recording and concerts. Not a routine but a way of being.

Their life is garage, psychobilly, voodoobilly, rock and roll, orgasmic epilepsy of often elusive and unattainable frenzies. Their means are few but not fragile, in a continuous short-circuit that breaks down the fragility of the stage in order to create, freely, a theatrical performance where writing and acting are continuous breaths. It is an apnea that fortifies the lungs.

Thus finding ourselves in an anomalous funeral, in which we can continue to die and celebrate together with terrifying and agonizing characters in the riot of scenarios where their journeys and messages can be easily understood. And it is the uniqueness that takes on mockery and also makes us laugh with bitterness and complicity to bless the jubilation that comes to exalt. There is no friction, no relenting, no wavering. Their music, visceral and rough, needs no complex systems, no multi-purpose structures, no strategies: it is a night missile, with its murderous powder, spurting out to hit our central nervous system with precision.

But we dance, we get high, because the chromosomes, the rungs of their DNA always lead to make our bodies a moving puppet.

It is the dictates of junk culture that take over to join the collection of second-class horror movies and beyond, in order to compact the proscenium where everyone can watch the play and applaud.

All of this including entertainment with consequential criticism that is not lacking, ending up enchanting because their depth of reflection is always lucid and extremely valid. 

Capable of imagery connected to transfiguration, like priests of a religious cult to be discovered and thrown headlong into, Poison and Lux create a tireless cast, with the intent to purify that which they themselves first soiled. Music that kills the present, from which they keep well away, not out of nostalgia for the past, but due to the fact that current decadence is devoid of content and interest for these artists. And also because the decadence of ancient times continues to excite, to produce attraction, and their meticulous search for what it produced allows them a continuous falling in love.

They celebrate pop culture by using rock'n'roll and the ability to digress, to take on the role, unquestionably, of souls pregnant with the perfect mix of description of hallucinatory stories and a willingness to throw them into contemporaneity, thus eliminating the sociological role of talking about it. A functional and very powerful stratagem: they are the women and men of the past who visit the present.

The American avant-garde, moving from unknown writers but capable of cultured and conscious languages, to filmmakers completely detached from reality, to an army of pornographic continuous manifestations, leads the world's most beautiful couple to breathe multiple connections that always convey the will to immersion. They end up creating a gaze that does not need to open its eyes, but to make them dance on dense layers of attitudes and costumes in which undressing is the only form of opposition to masks and clichés that empty the veracity of existence.

Determined to be in a four-piece lineup from the beginning and where the bass instrument could be excluded, they began with two guitars, Bryan Gregory's splendid and obscene one and Poison's. The role of drummer was always complicated, an obsession related to dissatisfaction. However, The Cramps were determined to win over bored New Yorkers by bringing them into their hemisphere, which had within it many elements that had spawned the same punk that had a large following in the American city. But its ashes were left, and they managed to eat them up with their madness.

Subverting the cliché that the originator of the whole thing was male-dominated, Lux is "reduced" to vocalist and performer, while the sensual and powerful Ivy becomes the mind behind the whole project: women carve out a fundamental role, bringing about a remarkable change. 

Songs are born, they proliferate, numerous and able to be free in resembling each other as well as occasionally manifesting the possibility of new forms that make their musical collection a perfect block.

However, I do not want to go too far into an analysis of The Cramps world, since to do so I would have to write a book at least. I have mentioned, prepared, introduced this band a minimum because I believe that there are often bands that have entered mythology, but of which the public often has no precise knowledge. So much is the value of this band as enormous is what it has generated, bringing artists that we do not even imagine to use in large doses its artistic and human path.

Models, Masters, long-fingered spirits, frighteningly prehensile, they have managed to contaminate, to sow into art extremes with recklessness and awareness, making their path, which had begun from a simple hitchhiking, become eternal.

The selection proposed by the band is satisfying because it succeeds in making clear the routes of their path, feeding the listener who does not know them with authentic delicacies, gems ready to fire their bullets of resounding power, into bodies and minds that will know rapture.

Human Fly could not be missing, daughter, mother and grandmother of a vodoobilly cave, in which to sigh inside the guitar that is the beating heart of a celestial flight, made ghostly by vocals.

The Way I Walk surrounds the head, in a 1950s parade of makeup-filled eyes, while the stop-and-go, screams and guitar swings make our bodies shambling.

With Domino we are in the equestrian circus, a tent where we dance Psychobilly without friction but knowing how to raise the dust of our hearts.

Then comes Surfin' Bird and it's pogo, the lightness and the need to step on the waves, rapidly.

Lonesome Town is a slow, sensual whiplash, an evocative procession to reach the city of broken hearts, where we learn to forget, amid sobs and tears.

Garbageman is seduction, an invitation to shake off all hesitation, with scratchy, slippery guitars and Lux's work to set the microphone on fire with sighs and sucks designed to awaken numb souls.

God Elvis lives in Fever, which The Cramps make bitter, cadaverous, ghostly.

Drug Train is a beat that accompanies a band's never-denied penchant for transgression that here has fun in a journey where drugs show their brilliance.

Love Me is pure, polished sex, muscle-moving and leading desire to fulfillment.

I Can't Hardly Stand It is the collection of troubles that generate attraction accomplishing the miracle, in its simplicity, of photographing an undeniable attitude. 

Goo Goo Much is the psychedelic side of the 60s kissing the sunbeams of the 50s in a perfect stylistic marriage.

She Said is Lux's yelp through gritted teeth, a sick crooning until the tribal acceleration that conquers.

The Crusher is the madness of a rock 'n roll guitar riff, in a gory story that is somewhat anesthetized by this epileptic manner that shakes us.

Save It, demonic and dark, with its tremor being used to bring new bodies into the dance of sharing.

New Kind of Kick closes the compilation with its simplicity, just a few notes, the voice pushing as if it were possessed, in a list of desires that come to a determined path to fulfillment.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

10th November 2022