The Cramps "Big Beat From Badsville" 1997***

By no means my favorite Cramps album, but I couldn't resist posting it once I saw the Bad Girl video clip: Absurd, dirty and fetishistic - if that's what Lux and Ivy cooked up for MTV, I wonder what their home movies look like? Well, there's different kinds of people and different kinds of love in this world, but with this couple you know it's true love: After 25 years of living together, not many can honestly sing to their partner as lustfully as Lux does "I love your ass/ for bad or worse/I love your nasty way you curse/When you sit down, it's wild how you sit/Grind your heel in the ground, the groovy way you spit/Ooh, you look good, ooh, you smell good/Ooh, you taste good, like a bad girl should". But here is a rare case in show-biz: a couple that remained inseparable for 37 years, from meeting in college (in the Arts and Shamanism class) to Lux's death in 2009. They never got married or had any children - I guess you could say The Cramps were their lovechild, and they gave everything they had to the band, living the rock'n'roll lifestyle to the max: world tours, crazy unhinged performances, sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. They originated the whole psychobilly music scene, by deriving their inspiration from horror movies, vintage porn, exotica, obscure 50's rockabilly and 60's surf and garage and filtering it all through punk's DIY aesthetic. Poison Ivy is probably the most underrated guitarist ever, delivering her inexhaustible stock of surf/rockabilly licks with silent cool while Lux wailed, gurgled, screamed and sang like a madman in the throes of an epileptic crisis. 

By the 90's their sound hadn't changed much from the days of psychobilly landmarks Songs The Lord Taught Us and Psychedelic Jungle, despite exchanging the 2nd guitarist for a full-time bassist. But inspiration didn't come knocking as often as before. Live they were as wild as ever, a force of nature actually as I've described before, but their albums contained more and more filler. "Big Beat From Badsville" was their 7th (and penultimate) full length LP, written and produced exclusively by Lux and Ivy. It's distributed by the indie punk label Epitaph, which may explain why it sounds a bit rawer than its predecessors. It opens with "Cramp Stomp", a song bearing all marks of the band: jungle beat, wild guitar and deranged vocals. "God Monster" is a messy psychedelic horror piece, "It Thing Hard-On" is raging garage punk and "Like a Bad Girl Should" a rhythmic rocker with a dirty riff, nasty lyrics and lusty vocals. Mid-tempo boogie "Sheena's in a Goth Gang" and "Queen of Pain" introduce us to a couple of memorable female characters whom no sane man would want to meet. "Monkey With Your Tail" revisits their favorite jungle theme while "Devil Behind That Bush" and "Super Goo" take their cue from 50's R&B. "Burn She-Devil, Burn" and "Haulass Hyena" are sped-up rockabilly and "Badass Bug" and "Wet Nightmare" are wigged-out surfin bird-style psychopunk. The latter introduces a novelty in the guise of an out-of-control theremin sounding like a malfunctioning UFO driven by an intoxicated alien. In the end, despite being a simple re-hash of The Cramps' familiar formula, "Big Beat From Badsville" is still great fun and puts all other psychobilly acts in their shade. Lux's death deprived us of an one-off rock'n'roll original - we're not about to see his position as psycho-sleazy king of trash rock'n'roll challenged any time soon...

***** for Like a Bad Girl Should

**** for Cramp Stomp, Queen of Pain

*** for It Thing Hard-On, Sheena's in a Goth Gang, Hypno Sex Ray, Monkey With Your Tail, Devil Behind That Bush, Burn She-Devil Burn, Wet Nightmare

** for God Monster, Super Goo, Badass Bug, Haulass Hyena