The Creeps
Enjoy The Creeps

It's really unfortunate to be a handsome musician: you start with the commendable intention of staying tough and pure, never giving in to even the slightest compromise; after the initial slog, you gain some minimal visibility; and then teenagers in hormonal overdrive start drooling over you, and it becomes increasingly difficult to stick to your initial good intentions, resisting Mammon; until you turn into a lacquered and glossy plastic idol for plastic people.

Sad that the story often goes like this, even sadder that this was the fate that befell a promising band like the Creeps, whose decline has fortunately faded away entirely.

Who remembers the Creeps anymore?

For the record, they were four Swedish lads who made a significant contribution to igniting the Eighties garage revival scene in Europe, releasing in 1986 this phenomenal debut album, a heartfelt tribute to Masters of the genre like Them, Animals, Shadows Of Knight, and - in particular - Sonics.

In fact, from the Sonics, our heroes borrow two lesser-known classics, "Maintaining My Cool" and "I'm A Rolling Stone," fusing them into a rhythm and blues-soaked medley of incredible power. Because it's an extremely powerful record, “Enjoy The Creeps,” throughout its duration and in all its twelve tracks, even in the two less intense and not strictly garage punk - "Come Back, Baby" and "Darling."

Contributing to this result are a tireless shouter with a sandpaper throat, presumably the illegitimate and unacknowledged son of Gerry Roslie, a blessed and omnipresent Farfisa that takes you straight back to the darkest and wildest Sixties and a monotone guitar, in the sense that from the first to the last note, it's channeled into a fuzz tone and won't shift from it, not even if you set it on fire like Hendrix or smash it to pieces like Townsend.

And so it goes, for just under thirty-five minutes of raw and derailing sounds, in the form of sharp, direct, and no-frills songs, always engaging and thrilling: in short, garage in its truest essence.

Many noteworthy tracks, from "Ain't No Square" to "Just What I Need," from "The Creep" to "She's Gone," but above all, the extraordinary opening of "Down At The Nightclub" shines, an irresistible dancing R&B riff carved out by the Farfisa, which certainly wouldn't have looked out of place in the discography of the aforementioned Masters: the definitive Farfisa-song of the Eighties garage and one of those tracks that should appear in any anthology of the genre, deserving of respect.

The following album, "Now Dig This," heralded the decline, although maintaining respectable standards; afterwards, there was the abyss and well-deserved oblivion.

But what matters is that there was “Enjoy The Creeps,” which together with “Outburst” by fellow Swedes Nomads, “Underworld Shakedown” by the Greeks Last Drive, and especially “Faces” by the Italians Sick Rose (I hope someone reviews them all before me), represents one of the peaks of the European garage revival, but not only that.

PS: And yet some still wonder why garage punk is one of the most exciting musical genres in the history of rock! In what other field can you find Italian, Swedish, Greek, French bands (not strictly garage punk, but how great were the Vietnam Veterans) and many others, capable of competing at the level of their illustrious English and American counterparts, sometimes surpassing them?