"Off The Bone", a must-have album of the Cramps

One of the first punk rock bands in the mid-’70s emerging with other bands like the Ramones, the Cramps were also founders of psychobilly, a form of rockabilly that mixed its looks with punk and horror imagery. The band was founded in 1973 by husband and wife group of Lux Interior and Poison Ivy and have gone through countless line-up changes.
As with a lot of the Cramps’ albums, Off The Bone has a number of rockabilly covers from “The Way I Walk” to “Surfin’Bird” that the band tweak to make their own. Due to the minimalist drums and lack of bass guitar, the focus lies on the dual guitars and the singing style of Lux Interior who adds a menacing tone with his haunting vocals.
It’s hard to know where the cover songs end and the originals begin, as the Cramps were influenced by the ’50s sound and their own material sounds like it was taken form that place in time and then fused with their camp humour and B-movie atmosphere.
The record is a UK-only compilation album that collects the entirety of their first EP Gravest Hits and includes other songs from their first two studio albums. A year later the album was released in the US as Bad Music For Bad People, but it had fewer tracks and seen as a weaker release compared to Off The Bone. The vinyl release of Off The Bone has an Anaglyphic 3D image on the sleeve (the red and cyan picture) with a pair of anaglyphic glasses inside to get the full effect. All of the other versions of the album such as the CD release only have the artwork in plain black and white, loosing some of the quirkiness that the band always put into their work.