Album: The Cramps

Fiends Of Dope Island, Vengeance

With primitivism on the rock'n'roll menu again thanks to The White Stripes, it's heartwarming – in a blood-chilling sort of way – to find The Cramps crawling out of their vault to bring us the degenerate psychobilly feast that is Fiends of Dope Island. Some artists may labour ceaselessly to refine the classic pop song or push rock's envelope in new and intriguing directions; others may seek to illuminate the human condition or report from the ghetto front line. Not so The Cramps. No, The Cramps are far too busy extolling the virtues of "Dr Fucker MD (Musical Deviant)", the latest nom de sleaze of the crazed vocalist Lux Interior, hopped up on demon rock'n'roll "like some mad nitro-meth kinda psychopath". And who's to say the world isn't a better place for it? It's refreshing to encounter such unbridled atavism and sheer bad taste in these sombre and self-conscious times. Not to mention the unashamed Satanism and the generally homicidal tone of songs such as "Big Black Witchcraft Rock" and "Fissure of Rolando", a Fall-style rockabilly grind in which Lux reports: "They found her body beautiful but never found her head/ Just some sweet goo and a nylon tricot thread" – a fine juxtaposition, you'll agree, of fashion tip and bodily fluid. It's all done in the worst possible taste, of course, but with impeccable nods in the arrangements to garage-punk precursors such as Link Wray and Jerry Reed. There's plenty to enjoy in Fiends of Dope Island, from Ivy Rorschach's twisted vibrato guitar on the old exotica standard "Taboo", to the description of the heroine of "She's Got Balls" as "Thin as piss on a plate/ And high as the sky above".