Customer Reviews

Songs the Lord Taught Us

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

...and I heard the song "Sunglasses After Dark" being played from behind the door. Before that I had never heard The Cramps, yet I ran in and bought the CD right out of the stereo for $4. This rocks from start to finish, and is the best straight-through listen album I own.

We are all indebted to this band still. One of the single greatest testaments of punk, rockabilly, horror rock, and rock 'n' roll ever recorded. Greasy, primal, sleazy, primative, raw - just a few adjectives well suited at describing this album. And unlike many albums, the cover songs are just as good as the originals. I can honestly not see how anybody could hate this album, unless of course if you are an art snob who thinks "The Wall" is the greatest album ever. Hard rocking and catchy as hell.

...I'm gonna tell ya 'bout _cool_/in one easy lesson! GO!" Yep...had to quote that, the beginning of this album's "Sunglasses After Dark", as that song really sums up the mad, crazed, dark-as-a-Memphis-alley-at-midnite badness of this amazing slab of rockabilly psychosis. There is nothing like the sound that is the Cramps, and for me, this album distills that cross of swampwater, moonshine, and nitro down to a dangerous and unstable musical substance, captured live like a crazed animal in these tracks cut at the legendary Sun Studio. Echo machines go mad, drums thud like someone pounding the furniture into matchsticks, and guitars slice through the speakers like some meat-saw-wielding mad butcher as Lux Interior howls, wails, spits like fury, and...yeah, tells you 'bout _cool_. Truly the sound of the South going horrifically wrong with total J.D. madness, rockabilly is supposed to be 'bad music'...but this is the baddest of the badness! It'll make you put a voodoo 8-ball gearshifter in your _life_! BUY!

I suppose it's old news about Lux Interior dying 50-years-and-a-day after Buddy Holly, but I'd be mistaken to not put in a word about what the guy's influence meant to me.

The Cramps are, without a doubt, one of the big influences on my life, a fact that becomes clearer as I get older. I'm not just talking about music, though about 90 percent of my records are due to their bad guidance. Their ability to take the best elements of early Rock 'n' Roll and make it completely their own freed me and a lot of others from what C.S. Lewis once called "chronological snobbery": the mindset that "new" is better, and that contemporary culture trumps all other considerations. That point really began to be made when I started hearing the originals of the songs The Cramps covered: that bloodcurdling scream The Phantom lets out at the beginning of "Love Me"? Sorry, college boy, but REM ain't gonna cut it after that.

It was Lux and Ivy that showed that the truly great stuff stands outside human constructs like "eras" and "decades", that you don't have to have your tastes dictated by whatever year you were born or graduated high school. That's why their influence spreads far beyond just music, and it also explains why rock critics, whose rock-music-as-art-form partyline The Cramps made so much confetti of, never understood them.

Well, I got it. So did plenty of others with no use for the ossified iconography of garbage like The Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. We all are in his debt, even if we live another 100 years.

Here's to you, Lux. When you're ready to get that stake out of your heart and go on another rampage, gimmie a buzz.

This is one of my favourite albums. It's an absolute classic and totally unique. The Cramps are basically fantastic.

If you've got a taste for the unusual, the dark, you like horror films and consider yourself an "outsider" then you have found your band.

The Cramps do sort of defy catagorization but if I was to try I'd say Swaggering Psychobilly Punks from Hell, but cooler

This is their long play debut. Just buy it, if you don't like it at first - learn

"Songs The Lord Taught Us" is like a continuation of The Cramps "Gravest Hits" album featuring clever, gruesome lyrics that border on parody (the opening track "TV Set"). Except that Lux Interior delivers them with such conviction we're not sure if he's kidding or not.

Naturally, there's some straight-ahead rockabilly in "Rock on the Moon", "Mystery Plane", the self-reverential "I'm Cramped" and concert favorites "Tear It Up" and "The Mad Daddy", but on this album The Cramps also reveal a punk sound on "Strychnine", "Sunglasses After Dark" and "Zombie Dance". The band walks the fine line between the two genres perfectly and nothing here seems out-of-place. In fact, this albums represents their best work in their 30+ years.

There's a better-than-average-but-not-boring cover of "Fever" and the irresistibly gritty "Garbageman" is appropriately dirty-sounding, but the album's best moment comes in "I Was a Teenage Werewolf", another '50s horror-movie spoof that has Lux spitting out the lyrics through gritted teeth as though he's transforming into one of the wooly man-beasts as the song progresses backed by hypnotic burlesque-stripper bongos. When he finally screams "Won't somebody stop this pain!" the listener is actually hoping for someone to put this poor creature out of its misery. THAT's how you sell a song. (This release also contains an alternate take in which Lux can be heard cussing someone out in the studio for their rude interruption).

A sleazy, dirty-sounding rockabilly/punk album that will likely make some feel like taking a shower after hearing it. Personally, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Five stars all the way!

The Cramps are very polarizing. Most people hate the very concept of them and loathe their existence. But if the idea of rockin' monsters, a big rockabilly beat, and the rantings of a wildman sound like something you'd be interested in, then this record is the place to start. Songs the Lord Taught Us was the debut album by the Cramps, following their EP Gravest Hits released the previous year in 1979. In this first full length, the Cramps unleashed a sickness that the country wasn't ready for - and, frankly, still isn't. The album sounded fantastic, despite the weird lyrics (full of werewolves, psycho killers, and other assorted unsavory members of society) and the extreme guitar work. Imagine Sonic Youth, perhaps, in a rockabilly context; that begins to scrape the top layer of the solos of Bryan Gregory. Alterniatively, it has been described as a five car pileup i on the Jersey Turnpike. That vision gives a sense of the evident dementia at work in this lovely record.

Recommended for anyone who loves the idea that Elvis Presley might have been replaced by Frankenstien's monster, and what that might have been like.

Oh the Cramps...

Not since the Stooges have I heard a band bang out something so primitive and obvious in such an unbelievable way.

The Cramps did to rockabilly what the Stooges did to rock 'n' roll, they took a pipe wrench to its knees and just f'ed it up beyond belief.

The thing is, its still very much rockabilly, you'll hear the 12 bar blues chord progression over a half dozen times on this album, but you've never heard it this echoed out and reverbed and primal and sick before. You've never heard rockabilly music THIS unhinged and messed up.

And thats the beauty of "Songs The Lord Taught Us." Its not WHAT the Cramps are doing, its HOW they're doing it.

Its just so very rock 'n' roll.

I don't really know how much any particular person needs by the Cramps, but I do know they all need THIS album. Get it now.

Still my favorite Cramps album, for it contains my favorite Cramps cover of The Sonics' "Strychnine." This is rock-a-billy, punk, garage, lo-fi production, and vocals straight out of the gothic school of Screamin' Jay Hawkins.

But it is better than all that and transcends that from which it was born.

Probably difficult to overstate how influential this album is, and the lame "you had to be there" is inadequate. For both The Cramps and DEVO were products of Ohio, low rent art scenes, and desperation to smash back at the sludge coming from the payola radio of 1970s America. What is ironic is the Cramps were accused of embracing a cartoonish version of Satanic theatrics as part of their image, while meanwhile head-banger music as ludicrous as a spandex pentagram was chronicled with precision and admiration by CREAM.

For anyone starting a band and considering your placement in the pantheon of rock genre, this is a must listen.

If Joe Bob Briggs had been a rockabilly singer (surely you remember the infamous - and funnier than hell - "Joe Bob Goes To The Drive In" C- movie review columns in the Dallas Times-Herald back in the day), and had appropriated Bow Wow Wow's rhythm section to put his version on wax (yes, children, this was still the day of long playing records when this stuff was cut), this is what he might have imagined. Except that the Cramps predated Joe Bob by a few years and could play Bow Wow Wow (like that was hard?) under the table, and the overall effect sounds more like Dracula trying on a pair of blue suede shoes.

But why quibble? This slightly possessed quartet sounded as though they'd grown up on a steady diet of Ed Wood horror misses and the original Rock and Roll Trio - whose "Tear It Up" they turn into a miniature masterpiece of zombie schtick whose subtleties Ed Wood wouldn't have appreciated. Lux Interior and Ivy Rorshach made a pretty kitschy songwriting team and for the most part the stuff is pretty effective. ("T.V. Set" is an absolute joy, for one.) The real treat: if ever you could have imagined Little Willie John's classic "Fever" (either his original or Peggy Lee's megahit cover) being played as a very suggestive dirge, the Cramps have delivered it. After all these years, it's still one of the most deliciously subversive album closers you'll ever hear.