Before Metallica butchered this band with their awful
redneck version of Die, Die, My Darling, (and to a lesser extent, Last Caress
and Green Hell but that was a completely different band, they had credibility
back then) and before Hot Topic raped the legacy of Danzig, Jerry Only and
company into a marketable tool for every wiener fourteen year old skater, the
Misfits were a great band, no, they were more than that, they were legendary.
Their brand of raw, gritty, B-grade horror movie punk that sounded like it was
recorded in a garage somewhere is still some of the most captivating music I
have heard. Glenn Danzig’s Elvis meets Jim Morrison drawl sucks you in with its
magnetism. You would think that with such a basic and simple structure to all
of their songs that you would get bored with them in about three seconds. I
mean really, there’s no time changes, no solos, no soaring high notes, no
guttural grunts, yet almost every song on this mammoth near one hundred song
boxset still gives me that metal energy, that excitement that you get when you
know you’re listening to truly wonderful music.
Technically, the Misfits have only released three full
length CDs with Danzig as their frontman, Static Age, Walk Among Us, and Earth
A.D. Despite this, there are literally dozens of songs from the Danzig era
floating around, whether they are on collections, seven inch records, or a
million singles. Since their unfortunate rise to popularity several years ago,
there have been several collections of these songs, some shoddy, some well
done. Me personally, I feel that this boxset is all you need, and maybe Walk
Among Us, because these four discs contain everything from the very first
recordings, two albums, a live cd, and even a two disc best of, so there is a
lot of ground covered with this. The first disc is a simple compendium of the
Collection CD’s, basically twenty five of the band’s hits. The classics keep
coming one after another here, She, Horror Business, Night of the Living Dead,
I Turned Into a Martian, Astro Zombies, Halloween, they just keep rolling off
the track-list. Favourites for this reviewer include the campy Where Eagles
Dare, the fun I Turned Into a Martian and the brooding and sinister Skulls. The
few duds here include the pointless Halloween II which is just a meandering
Latin chant and Braineaters, where you can enjoy the humour once or twice
before it just gets annoying.
Disc two is another cobbled together collection of
previously released discs, Legacy of Brutality which concentrates on the
seventies era of the group, the live disc Evilive, and the remaining songs off
Earth A.D. The early recordings sound very youthful and almost innocent, you
can tell these are a bunch of kids especially on tracks like Some Kind of Hate
and Hybrid Moments, although on the latter, even though the youthfulness is
blatantly obvious, this is in my opinion one song that captures everything that
one can say to describe the Misfits. Brooding, almost a bit popish, yearning,
with a great vocal deliver by Danzig. Evilive is one big auditory mess of
random noise. It sounds like it was recorded in someone’s jacket pocket at the
show. There’s no nice way to say it but this live recording sucks and I skip it
every single time. As we come to the end of the second disc with the tracks off
Earth A.D. we are greeted with another different side of the band. Gone are the
campy and fun times, instead what we have is bitter, angry and violent speed
metal that despite the terrible production, this shows the Misfits becoming a
metal band. Sad to say, this was their swansong, at least it was a respectable
one.
Disc three is the collectors’ meat; this has some real
rarities included. A CD chock full of studio outtakes, many of them unknown,
this contains the band’s earliest recordings of Cough, Cool and She, recorded
with Danzig playing his piano through a fuzz box while singing over them.
Although every song on this particular segment of the box is not hard to find,
these are the only versions of them out there. Take for instance, Where Eagles
Dare, there are three versions on this disc alone yet each is vastly different
from the other. One’s on steroids, the other on speed, and the other one sounds
like the normal version albeit with a bit different vocals from Danzig. The last
and final disc is the rest of the songs from the Static Age sessions and these
include three of their calling cards, Last Caress, We Are 138, and Bullet.
After Glenn left, the Misfits still made music with a new
singer. While many purists eschew the new Misfits I gave them a shot and I
really enjoyed their comeback album American Psycho. It’s too bad everything
after that was limp though. As a memorial to the legacy of one of America’s
great (former) underground legends, this boxset does a fine job in capturing
the spirit and the magic that was the Misfits.