The Cramps: Big Beat from Badsville

Epitaph Records

More than a decade ago some folks were muttering, “The Cramps are still around?” Well, hell, what do you want? The band that invented psychobilly (and they'd beg to differ too) refuse to go away until they've actually sold a few records and gotten some due—on their own panty-clad terms, of course. But as regards Big Beat from Badsville, that's an ambiguous thing.

Nothing has changed since 1979: The Cramps' only song is a trashy, burlesque rockabilly song, with jungle toms pulsing the voodoo-cursed juggernaut forward; at the helm a snarling, cross-dressing pervert who regularly spins uncanny rhymes like “queen of pain/you look good in that garter belt/queen of pain/give me a harder belt.” The first three tracks here are as twistedly earnest as anything on Songs the Lord Taught Us—the band's 1980 “piece” de resistance. It's almost enough to reaffirm everything this band once represented.

But Badsville ends up a tired, mixed bag: “Sheena's In A Goth Gang” might be a great title, but it's not much to chant of musically speaking, while “Monkey With Your Tail” and “Super Goo” sound like unwitting self-parody. Things do pick up toward disc's end with “Badass Bug” and “Haulass Hyena,” which do the Thorazine shuffle at least as well as Reverend Horton Heat, Southern Culture on the Skids, and anyone else who owes his/her existence to this seminal load. But how much modern Cramps is simple decadence-by-numbers, and how much of it is the real thing? They're still brilliant at times, and they'll always be brilliant at times, but it may be getting time to hang up the fishnets.

—John Pecorelli

Alternative Press magazine