The band’s first album release in 23 years resurrects their lost 1977 would-be debut, produced in collaboration with Alex Chilton.

It has been six years since I first wrote about The Cramps. As a brand-new initiate to their unique brand of sickness, I had only just begun to discover the dark, ghoulish glamour of their world, equipped with iTunes downloads of ‘Songs the Lord Taught Us’ and ‘A Date with Elvis’, plus a treasured promotional copy of ‘Flamejob’. The latter had a cover shot by lead singer Lux Interior, depicting guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschach resplendent in a black leather catsuit and welding hood. There was a Man Ray quote about Surrealism in the liner notes and a group photo of the band looking like something off a poster from the best sci-fi movie never made. In the years since, my love for the band has only grown.

The release of ‘Gravest Gravy’ on August 21^st constituted the first ‘new’ Cramps album in 23 years. The songs were originally recorded in 1977 during a cluster of sessions at Ardent Studios in Memphis with Alex Chilton producing which resulted in the band’s first single. However, for reasons still unclear today, the rest of the project was shelved. Decades later, Lux and Ivy formed tentative plans to release it, but the process was ground to a halt when Lux tragically passed away in 2009.

Now, at last, this lost quasi-debut album has been unearthed and restored in all its lurid glory. With Poison Ivy Rorschach on lead guitar, Lux Interior on vocals, Bryan Gregory on guitar and Nick Knox on drums, the band’s potent blend of rock n’ roll and hillbilly country combined with their love of surf instrumentals and underground pulp horror is fully formed. Its release comes thanks to Poison Ivy Rorschach, Larry Hardy of In the Red Records, and the careful stewardship of Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye, who maintained, edited and mastered the tapes. In its final form, ‘Gravest Gravy’ is every Cramps’ fan’s dearest dream, featuring material you would have heard, had you been lucky enough to see the band live during the first stretch of their storied career, including a slew of covers and early versions of songs that would become audience favourites.

‘Weekend on Mars’ cleverly twists the format of a classic two-and-a-half-minute rock song into a sci-fi B-movie (“Life’s more fun in the stratosphere / At least it’s not as bad as here,” Lux howls). A cover of Paul Revere and the Raiders’ ‘Hungry’, banishes the tinselly production and tongue-in-cheek innuendo of the original recording, infusing it with a sense of actual menace like only The Cramps can. Ivy’s slashing chords and the sandpapery, scuzzy distortion of Bryan Gregory’s guitar weave a dark spell over the track. A cover of Roy Orbison’s ‘Domino’ has Lux delivering a hiccupping, hillbilly vocal that strikes a balance somewhere between Jerry Lee Lewis and Hasel Adkins. Then, laced together with Ivy’s deft, churning chords, ‘Can’t Find My Mind’ features an eerie echo effect slapped onto Lux’s vocals, as though he was so disconnected from his mind that he was phoning in his vocals from the farthest reaches of outer space. It’s a magnificent effect any way you listen to it, but on a good stereo, it’s transcendent. That’s the thing about The Cramps: with their particular brand of otherworldly strangeness, they seemed from the start to be a band geared to defy the laws of time and space, to win generations of new fans from beyond the veil. 

These days, reflections of Ivy’s influence are everywhere: her stance, her sneer, her aesthetic sensibilities. Despite this, no one matches her style, her skill or her sound. No one plays like Ivy; no one comes close. She’s the queen of rock and roll for a reason. ‘Gravest Gravy’ is a pertinent reminder of Ivy and Lux’s mastery of their art, and of The Cramps’ rightful place in the annals of rock and roll history.