The Cramps
Smell Of Female

THE REVIEW

If Rock 'N' Roll doesn't scare your parents, you're not listening to the right stuff.

This is the first thought that comes to mind if you put on a Cramps album. I won't bore you with the history of the band: just know that the couple Lux Interior (frontman) and Ivy Poison (lead guitar, as well as Interior's partner) were the filthiest, most depraved, perverse, and brilliant in rock 'n' roll, which with them was called Psychobilly. After shaking up the underground music scene with their first two albums, the Cramps decided to release their first live LP: "Smell of Female."

Recorded in 1983 (after two years of forced recording inactivity due to a legal dispute with Miles Copeland) at The Lounge Peppermint discotheque in Manhattan on February 25 and 26 of the same year, the album in just 32 minutes shows the band at one of the highest levels of their career. Except for "Beautiful Gardens" from the album Psychedelic Jungle, included in the bonus tracks of the reissue, the original tracklist features four unreleased tracks and two covers. The explosiveness of the band is overwhelming: the use of a lead guitar (Ivy Poison's semi-acoustic) and King Congo Powers' rhythm guitar, thereby eliminating the use of the electric bass, gives the band's sound a sharp imprint like a shiny and well-sharpened blade. The typical Rock 'N' Roll chords are merely a means to convey the Cramps' original style. Their music is made for partying, as nihilistic as you can find in the music world. It forces you to total abandonment. It's music made not to make you think, that is, amoral (and not immoral) music, which makes puritans and moralists cringe, highlighting that in this world there is also sex, horror, and violence. They uncover and narrate the dark side of Man and society. To draw a literary parallel, in my opinion, they can be considered the Charles Bukowski of the music scene.

And so, songs like "Thee Most Exhaulted Potentate Of Love", "You Got A Good Taste" and "Faster Pussycat" (by Bert Shefter, one of the two covers on the album) are the expression of one of the themes of the Cramps' philosophy, or rather their non-philosophy: sex. The greatest taboo in history here becomes a fundamental element, along with eroticism, of the Cramps' performances and songs, completely eliminating the romantic element. "Call Of The Wighat" and "I Ain't Nothing But A Gorehound" are dedicated to violence and horror; they are for the bloodthirsty side in us. All seasoned with the rowdy screams of Lux Interior, which contribute to amplifying this sense of the horrible. Closing the delirium is a cover of Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction," and the finale is truly psychopathic, insane, and delirious with changes of speed, Poison Ivy's guitar solos combined with Lux Interior's noisy harmonica, which we can well imagine writhing and jumping from corner to corner of the stage until collapsing exhausted on the floor.

Just as we will have collapsed after listening to "Smell of Female."