The Cramps at Avalon, Oct 16th
Basim Usmani

According to researchers at the University of California, you have to add pantetheine to primordial ooze over the centuries in order to develop intelligent life. According to participants at the Avalon Ballroom on the 16th of October, it takes an hour of live Cramps to revert that intelligent life back into bestial carnality. Want to talk about de-evolution? Imagine a thousand sweaty bodies undulating under the whims of a man with silver teeth. Lux has never looked so frenzied, and Ivy's as dead pan as ever. Their discography has fermented into a 30-year proof haze of psychedelics and spunk, with a fanbase as rabid as Osama's. Cramps fans slip through your fingers like terror cells; everyone from the English professor at school to the life guard at the pool could be one of them. When Lux commands us to "shake the foundations" of the Avalon during the encore, we all detonate ourselves in his name. AlLux-ho-Akbar.

Unlike other performing bands from that era, they didn't subject us to a "Gravest Hits" set. There were plenty of tracks from their latest release, "Fiends of Dope Island", a cover of the vintage hit "The Twist" with some of their more manic tunes peppered as crowd pleasers. I nearly pulled my hair out when they played "Let's get Fucked Up", and we all tried to hiccup along to "Can't Hardly Stand It". The reverb drenched surf guitar and shuddering vocals sounded infinite, echoing from every crevice of the Avalon. Floundering, we had to focus on the sharp finite "thwack" of the snare to hoist ourselves out of the bog. Lux taunted us from the edge of the great wide stage; people tumbled and piled over each other in hopes of touching their lord. Soaking it up with the scum of the earth is like taking a mud bath. It's hard not to feel cleansed.