The Cramps - Smell of Female (1983)

One of those all-time-great live-albums. Goes hard and has a nice story attached: label issues, Cramps not allowed to release anything, bootlegged like crazy, old songs, again and again, sound bad, bootlegged, after all, such is the nature of, but then, Smell of Female detailing transition between two periods for the band, public thirst, hungry band, some fun covers, some fun originals, would be important enough if it weren't so good, but it is, so good, Call of the Wighat, She Said (bonus), (also included)

A+

try / buy

The Cramps - Rockinnreelininaucklandnewzealandxxx (1986)

Smell of Female is my jam and all but holy fucking shit have you heard this? That one's important as an album and a document- b-movie-obsessed freaks kept from recording anything for two years finally get to release something and it's somewhere between the reverby freakiness of where they'd been and the aggression of where they'd go. This one's pretty much all the way there- tiny pants, noise guitars, and animal singing

A

try / alt / buy (1 / 2)

Creedence Clearwater Revival - Green River (1969)

One of my favourite albums ever! I love the cover so much that I'm gonna put the back below!

It's so awesome! The weird rural washed-out-ness of those pictures makes Fogerty's reminiscences on the opening track Green River seem all the more personal to him, and also make the listener nostalgic whether or not they know where the catfish bite. The rose-tinted Romantcism- not only rural, but childhood memories leads into Commotion, where the timeless sentimental vacuum full of small but exciting details is replaced by the modern obsession with time, treadmills, and political gibberish. It'd be cheesy but the band earn the right to be Romantic every now and then by being so convincingly chaotic when they need to be. Things only get darker as the album progresses! The nasty side to nostalgia is that it can only exist when the person feeling it believes that the present and future are in decline, and that's what happens in Green River. As soon as the regrets of Commotion are out of the way, Fogerty's paranoid in Tomb Stone Shadow where he's reminded of death whenever he's happy, and practically welcomes the apocalypse in Bad Moon Rising. Part of what sells all this to me is his voice which once annoyed me but started to click as I played Green River for the first time. Wrote A Song For Everyone is moving in a way that his superstitions can't be, the down-and-out Lodi becomes all the more sympathetic, and the closing cover The Night Time Is the Right Time convinces me that he's one of rock's greatest vocalists. 9 tracks, under half an hour, all good, 3 of the best rock songs of all time, and a dark, regretful atmosphere hanging over even the more excited ones

A+

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