The Mummies
Play Their Own Records!

Ok, if you want to hear a clean, well-recorded album, with innovative riffs and refined sounds... well you're just on the opposite path. The Mummies offer something entirely different: wild rock'n'roll rhythms to dance to, adrenaline-fueled/demonic screams, obsessive melodies, savage sounds. The Mummies are indeed the masters of low-fi music par excellence: poor amplification, crackling sounds, distorted vocals due to terrible microphones, cymbals that seem like a flanged background noise, live recordings, and tattered mummy uniforms with All Stars.

Yet, despite the click recordings, guitar overdubs of the sort "...if you don't put a crunch under the guitar, it doesn't work...", despite the technique and musical innovation, the albums by The Mummies "rock": the songs give you energy, they make you tap your foot, they make you drum your fingers on the steering wheel, because if the band goes all out, the listener notices. They might not appreciate it, but they do notice.

"Play Their Own Records!" is their first full-length album, released in 1992 by the label Estrus, in which the mummies compile their early singles. The music is a mix between 60s garage rock (some songs are covers of bands that made history in the genre, like The Sonics and The Wailers), blended with the surf sounds of their home state (California) and punk rock/psychobilly outbursts, all garnished with a horror b-side movie style keyboard/Farfisa (it couldn't be otherwise).

In the first part of the album, you hear the more garage/punk songs, where the main features are: saturated guitar, hoarse and howling singing, four-four time "tu pappa tuttupà" drumming. The album concludes with three "atmospheric" instrumental tracks, where the keyboard stands out, with true mummy ballads freshly out of a sarcophagus.

The album was only printed on vinyl (I spotted it at the last Vinilmania in Novegro for €180) due to the mummies' aversion to the digital format, which they eventually relented to in 2003 with the release of "Death By Unga Bunga!!".

My advice is to give this album a listen (even just to know there is a group of such caliber crazies) and to watch some of their live performance videos which are both fun and unsettling (the keyboard always meets a terrible fate...).

The Kings of Budget Rock!

Track list:

Side one:

1. That Girl
2. Test Drive
3. I'm Bigger Than You
4. Dirty Robber
5. Food, Sickles, And Girls
6. One By One
7. Out Of Our Tree
8. Tall Cool One
9. A Girl Like You
10. That's Mighty Childish
11. (Doin') The Kirk

Side two:

1. Die!
2. Mashi
3. The Fly
4. The House On The Hill