Human Fly

The sound is recorded as if through a tin can dragged behind a moving car, and that is entirely the point. The guitar riff is elementary — two or three notes repeated with a grinding, fly-buzzing persistence — and everything else orbits that insistence like debris around a drain. Lux Interior does not sing so much as he occupies the microphone: his delivery is a kind of theatrical delirium, somewhere between a carnival barker and a man experiencing a genuine mental event. The lyric's conceit is absurdist and gleefully repulsive, a self-description that could come from a B-movie creature feature, but the tone is so committed that it stops being a joke and becomes something stranger. The Cramps came out of a moment in the late 1970s when certain people decided that rock and roll had gotten too polished and too serious, and they reached back past the British Invasion to the American garage, to the primitive electricity of Sun Records and exploitation-film soundtracks. This is what they found: something that sounds like rockabilly played by people who had never been asked to be respectable.