CRAMPS, (The) Stay Sick LP Vinyl

Stay Sick came out in 1990 and if you weren't already a Cramps obsessive by then, this record had a way of making the decision for you.

By this point Lux and Ivy had relocated from New York to LA and the record sounds exactly like that suggests, hotter, sleazier, swampier. The production leans into the low-end rumble while Poison Ivy's guitar stays razor-sharp through tracks like Bikini Girls with Machine Guns and All Women Are Bad, two songs that hit like a double feature at a drive-in cinema that only screens things your parents would've confiscated. The Cramps never made a polished record and Stay Sick is no exception, it's raw psychobilly the way it was always meant to be, genre-blurring, horror-drenched, and deeply committed to its own mythology. This is the record that bridges their early Memphis recordings with the full cartoon menace of their later work.

Format: 12" Vinyl LP (Reissue). Genre: Psychobilly, Garage Rock, Rockabilly. Country of origin: USA. Original release: 1990.

Fans of: The Meteors, Mad Sin, Batmobile, Horrorpops.