Songs the Lord Taught Us (CD - 1980)

Additional personnel: Booker C (Alex Chilton) (organ).

Principally recorded at Sam Phillips Recording Studio, Memphis, Tennessee.

Digitally remastered by Mike Reese (A&M Studios, Hollywood, California).

U.K. release features five bonus recordings: "I Was A Teenage Werewolf (Original Mix)," "Mystery Plane (Original Mix)," "Twist & Shout," "I'm Cramped (Original Mix)," and "Mad Daddy (Original Mix)."

An early (1980) effort by the simultaneously minimalist and over-the-top retro-shlockabilly kings, sympathetically produced by their fellow devotee of Southern culture on the skids Alex Chilton. Poison Ivy's guitar work here is her usual mix of trashcan chording and distorted surf riffs, and singer (?) Lux Interior is in particularly good faux-Elvis form on such instant classics of self-aggrandizement as "The Mad Daddy" and "I'm Cramped." The band, as is their wont, also throws in some interesting covers here, including the Rock and Roll Trio's "Tear It Up" and a version of '60s grunge pioneers the Sonics' "Strychnine" that's so primitive it makes the original sound like Yes by comparison. In a word--wow. minimize