The Nitwitz' Tony Slug will be guest on VPRO radio this Tuesday between 1 and 2 pm, playing some of his favorite songs and offering his unpopular, but laudable opinions. Tune in, turn on and don't drop out...

The Cramps - How To Make A Monster (Vengeance 2CD).
There's really no need to explain the beauty of the Cramps' early work here, I figure alla you NBT readers consider it fact and/or truth rather than something that needs to be explained over and over again, and anybody without the band's first two albums in close range of their hi-fi really has no place being here anyways...
That out of the way, let's all rejoice in the arrival of what will hopefully be the first part of a trip thru' the band's private vaults, 'cause HTMAM really only scratches the surface of what must be locked in there.
Being the first trawl, this set is both enlightening and frustrating at both what is and isn't here. I mean, it's great to finally hear the '82 Terry Graham demos in decent fidelity, but why not include the entire session?. On the other hand there's completely new to me 1976 rehearsals that not only let us hear wonderfully primitive versions of long-time favorite songs, but they also prove that the band had their basic gameplan set from the git-go. Later rehearsals offer similar delights; from '82 there's four attempts at something called Rumble Blues and a apocalyptic Lonesome Town, while material from the Stay Sick era has aged much better than the released versions 'cause they lack the dated production.
The second disc offers two live sets of which the '77 Max's show is probably only of "historical interest", but the CBGBs set from a year later offers the band in full flight delivering deadly versions of Human Fly, Teenage Werewolf and Sunglasses After Dark. So yeah, by all means dig into this (heck, even with 45 tracks in 143 minutes there's some cool hidden extras as well...), and let's us pray for future volumes containing the Ohio demos, the Richard Robinson and Chris Spedding demos, the 1980 Utrecht show, the, well, you get the picture...