What The Cramps did, was take Rock'n'Roll and explore it to it's trashiest, most savage limits.

At least that's what I thought in 1982 or so when I heard this album for the first time.

Since then, more recent bands have managed to achieve a greater sense of savagery, from Sonic Youth to the Royal Trux. I'd argue that The Cramps paved the way for them.

It all boils down to how you define Rock'n'Roll.
Ok, so this is bit of a "memory lane" album, for me, but I'm gonna argue along the lines that The Cramps music was at once turned towards the past as well as sonically pioneering for the noisemongers of the future.
The "past" bit is easy enough. The band is a living tribute to the American garage bands of the sixties and the cover version on this album is a convincing version of "Strychnine" by The Sonics. The album is bathed in a "trash" culture of "B" horror movies. It's filled with madness, at times spine-chilling at times voluntarily humorous ("My brother owns a UFO, drops me off in Mexico" is a line from Mystery Plane). Horror scenes from the cult to the downright psychotic. There's a dose of  fifties referencing in there too. A certain image of rock'n'roll. The Cramps seem to have a certain image of rock'n'roll as an Americana kind of rebel thing. They're respectful of their forefathers and I read on the back cover that the record was recorded at Sam C.Philips recording studio in Memphis, no less. Indeed. So in a way, in spite of all the savageness, in spite of all the tribal beats, fuzzy guitar and discordant twanging and screaming the record is, to a certain extent,  something of a quaint piece of memorabilia. To a certain extent, The Cramps' vision of rock'n'roll hearkens back to an America of the past, an alternative, "underground" America, maybe, but an America of the fifties (or sixties if you push it) nonetheless.
Of course, The Cramps were not The Fuzztones either. At the beginning of the eighties, there were a load of bands that I really dug that were basically throwbacks to sixties grungy garage stuff. Not just sixties, more 1966, or pre-1966, bands that existed as tributes to a particular raw and nasty garage sound. The Fuzztones were a great band if only for the number of  unknown minor "classics" that they brought to light with all their cover versions (Honest, I used to think all those songs were theirs). They even named a Garage compilation a few years ago "Songs we taught the Fuzztones". Every time The Fuzztones came to play a gig some place near where I lived, I somehow managed to miss it. Which I sorely regret, because the Fuzztones were possibly the best of the garage throwback bands of the beginning of the eighties. Hey, they were maybe even more than that. Perhaps they managed to transcend the garage genre and put in something of their own too. I won't go into this here. But the point I'm trying to make, although  with some difficulty, is that the Cramps certainly managed to transcend the genre and proceeded to make a kind of music that basically hadn't been done before…
They were one of the first bands I listened to that blatantly affirmed that it wasn't important to play well. This seems to be one of the accepted values of Rock'n'Roll today, but in 1980 it probably wasn't. I don't know if they actually said that they didn't try to play well, but listening to this album leaves no doubt. Of course, it's possible to get a bit farty about this "playing badly" kick. It's a theory that has come a long way since it was first put into practise by the punks of the 70s. Nowadays, bands study their disharmony carefully. They go to great pains to appear raw and spontaneous, to achieve a kind of alternative slightly dissonant aesthetic.
Whatever, the Cramps weren't aiming for technicity. They were voluntarily noisy and messy. This should have been encouraging for me, strumming along on my first electric guitar when I was sixteen or so. However it wasn't because, although the band didn't try to play "well" (which was something they had in common with me) they obviously had a good sense of how they wanted their music to sound and bunged in a lot of effects to get that sound, from the jangling distortion, through echo and fuzzbox to that twangy surf vibrato sound. And that was a load of equipment I just didn't possess.
So they weren't aiming for technicity but they did define an aesthetic, and what a weird aesthetic it was ! Recreating fifties guitar sounds, twangy vibrato, reintroducing the fuzzbox to popular music, reinventing the whole rockabilly sound. What a rockabilly sound it was. I think they must have started this whole "punkabilly" or "psychobilly" thing. Unless it was the Meteors. I'd take The Cramps rather than The Meteors any day. I saw The Meteors in concert twice. Very short sets, very little commitment, contempt for the audience… Unfortunately I never got to see The Cramps.
What a rockabilly sound it was. A kind of zombie rockabilly, rock'n'roll played by George Romero's living dead. Rockabilly passed through a blender, layered with noise, drenched in fuzz, sliced up with razor sharp discordant guitar.
This is why I love this album. It's such a noise statement. And this is where it cleared the way for things to come.
Ok, so in 1980, the general idea was bands moving from the new punk minimalist aesthetic into the even colder aesthetic of new wave. The Cramps didn't do this, they looked back and re-explored the roots of rock'n'roll, it's most savage basic riffs. Rather, they reinvented them, showed us the full extent of the music's manic potential by going all out on the noise, by playing in a way that just wouldn't have been accepted before. Maybe punk did have a role to play in The Cramps' development inasmuch as after the advent of punk, bands were allowed to indulge in noise.
My personal favourites are TV Set and Garbageman. TV Set is an absolute classic in psycho rock. Nutso rock. A possessed, deranged voice. A tribal, hypnotic hammering. A rumbling background of messy off-tone guitars, a weird discordant "solo" (can it really be called a solo?) and a storyline somewhere between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and American Psycho.
Garbageman is another of the bands trash/psycho numbers. A simple "rock'n'roll" intro riff augmented by bursts of a distorted chord that chops back and forth repeatedly, hypnotically. Another "solo" from outer space. A chanting, manic voice. Stuff for loonies.
 

Possibly my next Cramps buy, A date with Elvis came out in 1986.
 

"Smell of Female" is a great live album. Originally, though, it was only an E.P. six tracks long. Apparently 3 tracks have been added to the CD. Probably more "cult" and less demented than Songs the Lord taught Us. Contains cover version of theme song from Russ Meyer's 'cult' movie "Faster Pussycat, Kill, kill, kill..." (When I finally got to see that film, at at midnight showing in a Paris movie theatre, it was a bit of a let-down). The garage classic cover version here is Countfive's "Psychotic Reaction.)
 
 

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