Album: Heavy Trash

Going Way Out With Heavy Trash (Yep Roc)

The second set by Jon Spencer's psychobilly side-project with Matt Verta-Ray presses all the right buttons – sometimes all at the same time, as in "Crazy Pritty Baby", which blends elements of Bo Diddley, Eddie Cochran and Hank Mizell. The opener "Pure Gold" is pure genius, a rockabilly canter in the warped lineage that runs from Mizell and Charlie Feathers to The Cramps and The Fall, with Spencer's vocal deconstructed into a sequence of yelps, howls and hiccups, from which protrudes the occasional phrase – "get lost!", "oh yeah!", "Noo Yawk citteah!" – all bearing audible exclamation marks. Elsewhere, the territory runs from the Johnny Cash jog-trot rhythm of "That Ain't Right" to the revulsion of normality in "I Want Oblivion", but it's the combination of infantile lyric and leering stutter-vocal that makes "Kissy Baby" perhaps the quintessential Heavy Trash track, affirming the undertow of moral turpitude and sexual corruption that parents discerned in pioneering rock'*'roll.

Download this: 'Pure Gold', 'Kissy Baby', 'Crazy Pritty Baby', 'Crying Tramp'