‘Gravest Gravy’ by The Cramps
★★★
For 33 gloriously scuzzy years, the Cramps served up “a proprietary cocktail of Sun-baked rockabilly, surf rock, early R&B, and punk attitude,” said Kory Grow in Rolling Stone. Gravest Gravy, an album consisting of a dozen previously unheard tracks that were recorded in 1977, with Big Star’s Alex Chilton producing, captures the band’s pioneering psychobilly sound at its birth. The group’s “B-movie aesthetic” set them apart as frontman Lux Interior and his partner in life and lunacy, guitarist Poison Ivy, made their mark on New York City’s nascent punk scene a year earlier. Lux died at 62 in 2009, but Poison Ivy partnered with punk icons Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye to restore and release this record’s early takes on originals like “TV Set” and covers like “Rockin’ Bones,” this one “far creepier” than the version on 1981’s Psychedelic Jungle. “Is this the place to start a Cramps collection?” asked Jem Aswad in Variety. “Probably not.” The 1977 lineup had a second guitarist but no bassist, making the band’s sound “even tinnier and trashier.” Still, Gravest Gravy is “a glorious surprise addition” to the catalog of “one of rock’s most brilliantly unhinged bands.”
‘Weezer (Gold Album)’ by Weezer
★★★
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In concept, the third single from Weezer’s latest album doesn’t sound promising, said Ryan Reed in Consequence. “A self-referential quiet-loud rocker,” the song, titled “C.E.O.,” intentionally imitates the feel of the band’s very first single, 1994’s “Undone—The Sweater Song,” and opens with Rivers Cuomo speak-singing that he wishes he could do something new. Fortunately, “everything about ‘C.E.O.’ feels real,” from the lyrics to the angsty, fuzzed-out guitar attack. It’s not “instant-classic Weezer,” but it’s certainly “keeper-tier Weezer” and emblematic of its surroundings—the band’s “funniest, rawest, most musically spry album since at least 2014.” It’s definitely the Weezer album “with the gnarliest guitar sounds and most thunderous rhythm section,” said Tim Sendra in AllMusic. On this, the group’s seventh self-titled album and 20th overall, every tune was hashed out by the bandmates face to face, a method they’d never tried before. “Even if the songs were weak, the massive sound of the record would still make it worth a listen or two.” Fortunately, “the songs are some of the strongest Cuomo and the band have delivered in years.”
‘Monk Movements’ by Jon Batiste
★★★
Jon Batiste can’t hide his joy when he’s playing Thelonious Monk, said Michel Martin in NPR.org. On Monk Movements, one of three solo piano albums the eight-time Grammy winner released on Aug. 14, you can hear his exclamations as he constructs personal takes on “Blue Monk” and “Ugly Beauty.” Batiste fell hard for Monk’s music over 20 years ago, said Larry Blumenfeld in The Wall Street Journal. Now, as a global star, he’s released two tributes to the jazz legend, with Monk Movements the livelier of the two. Whether the Louisiana native is interpreting Monk or playing original compositions that engage with Monk’s legacy here, “it feels as if he’s letting us in on a private communion with his hero.” As on Batiste’s other piano studies albums, said Philip Martin in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, “his exuberance can outrun his discrimination.” In his improvisations, he wants to explore every appealing side road. Still, that beats mere imitation. With each tune, “he takes apart the machinery, treating Monk as a composer whose structures can withstand the same sort of reinterpretation routinely accorded Bach, Beethoven, or Mozart.”
