RECORD REVIEW : Frontal Attack on the Off-Beat

*** SWAMP ZOMBIES. “Chicken Vulture Crow.” Out There/Dr. Dream. The Swamp Zombies may come from the tidily preplanned, right-thinking ‘burbs of Irvine, but “Chicken Vulture Crow” is a deliciously fractured and subversive album that honors the freak-flag-flying spirit of New York’s Greenwich Village.

With their clopping bongoes, off-kilter tales and a healthy abhorrence for normalcy, the Swamp Zombies often sound like a less-scathing reincarnation of the Fugs, a band of ‘60s reprobates who hurled barbed screwballs at the world from their headquarters in Washington Square.

Unlike the Fugs, who were by and large maladroit musicians, the Swamp Zombies muster a focused instrumental attack. There are no virtuoso finger flights or silvery harmonies here, but this band of punk-rockers-gone-folkie delivers acoustic music with a wallop that benefits from the album’s lean, spacious production. The Swamp Zombies do a bit of politicking, but for the most part, “Chicken Vulture Crow” offers humorously framed snapshots of a world that, like a swamp, is murky, strange and mythically wondrous.

“Truly Needy” is a rapid-fire sneer at Reaganomics that casts the rich as uneasy victors of class warfare; it works because it sticks to mockery and sarcasm rather than unleashing soapbox polemics.

The other political song, “Open Up Your Eyes,” wastes a lovely, almost madrigalian melody on prosy lyrics that are little more than pamphleteering.

The other false steps on the album are versions of Simon & Garfunkel’s “A Simple Desultory,” a catty satire on the ‘60s folk scene that sounds badly dated, and Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” a fun concert number for the SZs that doesn’t add anything to an album that is fresh and funny enough not to need the novelty value of a heavy rocker done acoustically.

The album’s other remake, the Kingston Trio’s “Zombie Jamboree,” is, as they say, a hoot--a light, calypso tune that comes off as a folksy “Monster Mash.”

That leaves seven other nonpolitical originals, each one a pleasure informed by humor, melodic hooks and unexpected lyrical scenarios. Among them are “Coffeehouse Ray,” in which a beatnik lands in the Heart of Darkness; “Chucha,” a flamenco-style tune with a lyrical twist at the end that is like something out of a Borges dreamscape; and “Rudy the Magic Crow,” in which sprightly New Orleans jazz evocations lend humor and originality to that by-now-commonplace theme, the anti-drug warning.

Never mind all the walking-dead imagery--the Swamp Zombies have made a vibrant debut.