The Cramps - Psychedelic Jungle 1981 Full Album … stunning…
From grave to grave, from tomb to tomb, the Cramps end up in the cemetery of Back from the Grave.
Only they get there before Tim Warren has even armed himself with a shovel.
In fact, to be picky, they get there before anyone else does.
They wander among the brambles with shovels in hand.
But they aren't there to desecrate any tomb; they are there for the exact opposite.
They are there to bury.
They have dragged along the bones of Kip Tyler, Jim Lowe, Ronnie Dawson, Ronnie Cook, and other relics whose names are unknown, and now they dig to put them all together, side by side. A Spoon River for the impious.
More than a psychedelic jungle, a psychotic jungle.
Despite the fisheye lens used by Anton Corbijn for the cover shot trying to trick us into thinking we're inside a Byrdsian dream tinted in black, the second record from Lux and Ivy (here flanked by Kid Congo Powers, a guy who “for the love of Poison Ivy” had already played elsewhere mixing from the same allegorical garbage the Cramps feed on, NdLYS) is a kaleidoscope where every mirror has been painted black and the small colored glass prisms have been replaced by the green phosphorescent rot of will-o'-the-wisps.
The rotten sound of the Cramps is funereal and heavy, crackling and sickly, it drags slowly and bent among the underbrush while Lux's Cuban heel sinks into the phosphorescent muck where piles of dug-up earth collapse.
Everything is a primitive and sinister rasping of rock ‘n’ roll ghosts, of filthy stomps from a haunted house, of regurgitating and shriveled swamp blues from a witching night.
Mama, tell Dad that the circus has come to town.
The Reverend
