#shockabilly

[bitter69uk]

Released on this day (12 February 1990) by Enigma Records: Stay Sick!, the joyous and life-affirming fourth studio album by punkabilly deities The Cramps. Stay Sick! represented something of a comeback for the perverse black leather-jacketed Addams Family of punk: due to legal hassles with their former record label there had been a four-year gap since their previous album A Date with Elvis (1986). This one will always be a sacred text and sentimental favourite of mine: I interviewed Cramps’ fiercely glamorous guitarist and co-founder Poison Ivy Rorschach (she was a vision in leopard skin and diamanté cat glasses) on the Stay Sick! tour for my university newspaper when they performed at The Rialto in Montreal. (Read it here!). As she explained to me then, in a suitably macabre touch, The Cramps signed their record contract with Enigma over the grave of actor Bela Lugosi at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City (“It just seemed like an appropriate thing to do”). Anyway, Stay Sick! pulsates with The Cramps’ everyday-is-Halloween voodoo-hillbilly black magic, would be the final LP with Nick Knox on drums, the first and last with bubble-gum-cracking bassist Candy Del Mar (she was great!) and would feature The Cramps’ highest-charting single ever (“Bikini Girls with Machine Guns” reached number 35 on the UK Top 40 in 1990). And the lyrics offer the wit and wisdom of frothing mad man Lux Interior, like “You might believe the world is sweet / And fine as sugar candy, but I myself believe in whatever comes in handy …” (from “Daisys Up Your Butterfly”) and “Now they say that virtue is its own reward / But when that surf comes in I'm gonna get my board / Got my own ideas about the righteous kick / You can keep the rewards, I'd just as soon stay sick …” (from “Bikini Girls with Machine Guns”). Swallow a fistful of bop pills and crank Stay Sick! up LOUD today! Pictured: portrait of Poison Ivy by Rocky Schenck, 1990.

[dustedmagazine]

Thurston Moore & Bonner Kramer—They Came Like Swallows: Seven Requiems for the Children of Gaza (Silver Current)

More than 20,000 children have died in Gaza over the course of Israel’s genocide, while thousands more sustained life-altering injuries. These seven tracks, mostly improvised, meditate on that staggering violence without commenting overtly on it. There are no lyrics, except on the closing track, a cover of Joy Division’s “Insight,” no field recordings, no newsreel highlights, just a solemn, nearly prayerful attention to sound and spiritual engagement.

The two players are long-time friends and mainstays of New York City’s 1980s and 1990s indie/experimental scene. Moore made his name in Sonic Youth, first as a noisy, disruptive punk, later as the main generator of a silvery, lyrical guitar tone that is instantly recognizable whether in the later SY albums, his solo work, his free improvisations across jazz, noise and drone and here in this collaboration. Kramer is a multi-instrumentalist and a member of such bands as Bongwater, Shockabilly and Gong. He also played on a more occasional basis with the Butthole Surfers, Ween, Half Japanese and John Zorn. Still, he is perhaps best known for his production work; he shaped the sounds of slowcore pioneers Galaxie 500 and Low. Thus, while Moore’s contributions here are instantly recognizable—that guitar sound only comes from one place—Kramer’s are more elusive, a twinkle of piano in the maelstrom, an enveloping ambience of (maybe?) synth tones, the thud and ritual of percussion. In the opener “Urn Burial” the whistling treble of church organ threads its way through clanging guitar strums and martial, stirring drums. It’s cheerful but with a menacing undertone, a Pied Piper’s song leading the innocent into danger.

“The Redness in the West” takes its name from the Cormac McCarthy novel Blood Meridian, an evocation of violence and brutality in the American West. The song itself is ominous, arising out of a swell of strings, guitar notes crashing in with percussive furor; it is easy to imagine terrible events occurring against a backdrop of great beauty, the red light of sunset, the red stain of blood.

“They Came Like Swallows” is, perhaps, the most Sonic Youth-like of these songs, its guitar gently ramping the tension, the glitter of high notes studding the mesh. A sinuous thread of melody dodges in and out of view, a keyboard motif bobbing and weaving in the mix. The title is another literary reference, this one from William Maxwell’s 1930s novella about the Spanish flu, another dire period for little children and all living things. And, in fact, while the starting point may have been Gaza, the album’s broad reach suggests that abuse of the vulnerable is more or less a constant in human history.

Moore and Kramer avoid overt references, mostly, though the rolling, sweeping, Dirty-Three-esque “The Oceans Are Crying” does contain some ocean birdsong. But mostly the events that this album references are too weighty and too awful to tie directly to music. Listening to They Came Like Swallows is more like attending a memorial than watching a documentary; it’s all about the aftermath of war and suffering.

The album—and indeed the idea of collaboration—came out of the disc’s final track, a cover of Joy Division’s “Insight” which Moore and Kramer recorded at the very beginning of this process. It’s the only track with vocals and certainly the most song-shaped and rock-oriented of these cuts. And yet, it, too has a prayerful serenity, a coming to terms with the worst parts of being human. “I’m not afraid anymore,” it ends in murmured resignation, the children still dead, the war still ongoing, but the music, somehow seeking light and redemption.

Jennifer Kelly

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Shockabilly // She Was A Living, Breathing Piece Of Dirt // Heaven

[bitter69uk]

“Now they say that virtue is its own reward / But when that surf comes in, I'm gonna get my board / Got my own ideas about the righteous kick / You can keep the rewards, I'd just as soon stay sick …” from “Bikini Girls with Machine Guns" (1990) by The Cramps.

Recognize this wholesome, well-groomed student? It’s the yearbook photo of one Erick Lee Purkhiser of Stow High School in Akron, Ohio – but you probably know him better as Lux Interior (21 October 1946 – 4 February 2009)! The much-missed cadaverous, foaming-at-the-mouth frontman of punkabilly band The Cramps was born on this day 77 years ago! Do something extra perverted (or at least wear a black t-shirt!) today in Lux’s memory! Read my interview with The Cramps here.

[ruiraiox]