Welcome to art-rockabilly, a merger of the sensibilities and guitar styles of Link Wray and Lou Reed. Actually, this concoction – like fried grasshoppers and chocolate-covered ants – isn't half as unpalatable as you'd imagine. It turns out that the Cramps have reinvented a modern version of surf music. They probably wouldn't see it that way, however.

This is the kind of semisatiric band that sounds so hot that you're afraid to listen to the lyrics for fear you'll wind up hating them, or discovering that the songs are finally as preposterous as the group's hairstyles. As it is, except when he's singing straight rockabilly (a genre in which he's a 100 percent improvement over Robert Gordon), vocalist Lux Interior isn't particularly effective. But guitarists Poison Ivy and Bryan Gregory take a delight in reverb that I find genuinely engaging. And anyway, in surf music, expressionless singing was de rigueur (though the first time around, it was accidental and not the point).

On the basis of their earlier EP (which featured four revamped oldies, including "Surfin' Bird"), it's clear that the dozens of guitar-riff references – to Wray, Reed, Dick Dale, Johnny Rivers, Billy Lee Riley and so forth–are about as unintentional as, say, Interior's interpolation of "Louie, Louie" into "Rock on the Moon."

Yet here's a band that earns its eclecticism. These guys play all this trash so deadpan you feel like an anthropologist who's found an otherworldly culture that's been developing rock & roll along parallel musical lines but utterly divergent social ones. Taking them seriously as Manhattan avant-gardists might be too much to ask, but I don't mind having the Cramps. (RS 322)

DAVE MARSH