Misfits - Night of the Living Dead

Motorhead/Misfits + Black Sabbath = Metallica. That alone would be enough to secure this band a place of honor in rock history. A place made all the more deserved thanks to a handful of memorable songs. The Misfits formed in New Jersey in the year of our Lord 1977 (just three years after New York's Ramones): Arthur Googy on drums, Doyle on guitar, Jerry Only on bass, Glenn Danzig on vocals. They were disciples of the Ramones, which is to say of the Rolling Stones (when they fused blues into rock) or the Beach Boys (when they fused surf music, itself derived from the merging of "vocal groups" with rock'n'roll) run through a foundry, or cranked up to 1000 watts. And the fusion process, as with the Ramones before them, was hammered out through the pounding of Stooges, New York Dolls and Dictators. They were doing what would later be called "hardcore" (born earlier but codified later, as a flare-up of the English "noise", i.e. punk), which they "discovered" alongside Germs and Circle Jerks, after it had already been invented by the Ramones (misunderstood and unheard by the America of Patti Smith and Television; who exploded, like "immigrants in their own home", right after the explosion of English punk that they themselves had indirectly caused).

Punk is an English phenomenon; hardcore is American. Punk is the stripping away from a rock song of all its blues, melodic, harmonic, technical and arrangement components, pushing what remains of that root to the extremes of sonic, vocal and conceptual depravity. Hardcore is the same thing, except it violates that rock root with what would later be called "heavy metal". It's no coincidence that this latter genre was born in America: after punk had been born in England and translated overseas into hardcore; after hard rock (Deep Purple) had first been born in England, followed by metal (Judas Priest, Motorhead, Iron Maiden).

It took 5 years of screaming on stage (notably at CBGB's), amps blown apart by lightning-fast, chaotic, convulsive songs, before they finally arrived at an album that could gather up the offspring of these underground incests. It's 1982 when Walk Among Us (Rhino) comes out; it lasts 25 minutes, and they're 25 minutes without a breath. Generally considered the band's best album, it is nonetheless hampered by the flaws built into its very making: the material, and especially the way that material is performed, are pure '70s.

The album turns out (especially from a sonic standpoint) to be stillborn; dated before it even came out.

On the other hand, no one can tell the Misfits anything about the genre they invented; the problem, however, is that the invention dated back four or five years earlier, and in the meantime its own inventors hadn't updated it, so that by the fateful date of '82 they appeared more backward and less mature than their own offspring - the second generation of hardcore (Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Fear, Flipper) - who by '81, with Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Adolescents, Descendents and T.S.O.L., already seemed institutionalized, making it (historically) almost pointless for the Misfits to try to reassert themselves. "20 Eyes" (1:46) explodes immediately into a breakneck, cyclically self-referential chant, repeating and repeating until it dissolves or melts into a blinding sun. "I Turned Into a Martian" (1:43) changes rhythm and pace but not intensity: it kicks off one of the band's dearest themes, later much exploited by the genre - that of alienation, seen in a childlike way by depicting the afflicted subject as literally a Martian. "All Hell Breaks Loose" (1:47) is the album's first masterpiece: a breathtaking chorus, a voice subliminally hoarse and calmly stunned, a beach/noir gait. "Vampira" (1:26) shifts the framework once again: thematically, it shows how the Misfits are the Black Sabbath of hardcore; sonically, the same holds true - black, darkness and night, even when, sometimes out of place (though never losing a certain tragic pathos), it indulges "goofily" in not taking itself seriously. "Nike A Go Go" (2:16), at different volume, could be Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Arabian Knights". "Hatebreeders" (3:06) is the perfect synthesis of the good and bad, the beautiful and the ugly in the Misfits: an obsessive rhythm section, whip-cracking guitar, a stunned and lived-in voice (now speaking from beyond) - followed, unfortunately, by the glib, dumb high-school-style chorus urging us to forget all of it (starting with that very tragic quality, which alone lends nobility) and laugh at ourselves. This last element is the most Ramones-like thing about the Misfits: that goofy, limiting component which nonetheless made millions fall in love with the Ramones themselves. "Mommy Can I Go Out & Kill Tonight", taken straight from the smoky crowd of a live show, demonstrates what Danzig was capable of in that era and makes the Misfits one of the most compelling, great live bands: like someone who's afraid of nothing, has lost everything, and has nothing left to do but gamble away, in a self-flagellating smirk, this last nothing. "Night of the Living Dead" (1:58) deserves the same praise as "Hatebreeders", though it falls a notch below it. "Skulls" (2:00) arrives as the album's second masterpiece: a melodic intonation over a chaotic backdrop, in a tragic lightness that neither the Pixies nor Mudhoney would remain unmoved by; it sinks the soul. "Violent World" (1:46) keeps shifting its stance, losing itself a little in the process, yet its dynamics would be picked up by thousands of bands. "Devils Whorehouse" (1:45) is the third and final masterpiece: it seems to start out trivial, then builds into a series of choruses (marked by a metronome pounding underneath) that take flight into something almost sublime. "Astro Zombies" (2:15), more than for its form (though faithfully recycled by the Misfits' '90s college-rock incarnation), matters for its content: the zombie theme, which raises a smile today, became institutionalized - in film as in music and dark/Halloween fashion - through songs like this one. "Braineaters" (56") is a martial, sailors-on-leave sort of chant, hollow in both substance and style.

Earth A.D./ Woolfsblood (Plan, 1983), in terms of sound and mixing, is even more crippled than its predecessor. The songwriting, however, is superior. "Earth A.D.", had it been given an average recording instead of a terrible one (that very terribleness, however, which helps give Misfits' music its outer-grave, suburban charm), could have fit right onto Metallica's "Kill 'em All". "Queen Wasp" is no less impressive. "Devilock" kicks off straight into heavy metal territory: Danzig's voice (in its faint, controlled delivery) would prove a reference point for Hetfield. "Death Comes Ripping" sounds like it's trapped inside a detergent drum, but that's the "technical" bridle we mentioned earlier, one that doesn't eliminate the extreme violence the band pursued at all costs, with every member chasing maximum intensity. "Green Hell" is one of the most important songs in rock music. Nobody, not even the Sex Pistols, had done anything quite so violent; it attacks relentlessly, taking neither prisoners nor wounded. It's an irresistible psalm of self-destruction. When Metallica eventually cover it, all they'll need to do is carry it forward, not update it for '97 (because it already sounds like it belongs there). "Wolfsblood" opens, both thematically and programmatically, the saga of werewolves and graveyard desecrations in the nights of a pre- (or post-) industrial America: furious and uncompromising in tone and tempo. "Demonomania" dictates the speed (a thousand miles an hour) at which the Misfits (and plenty of teenagers back then) lived out their nocturnal graveyard adventures: and naturally, it's drugs that supply the brain with that speed. "Bloodfast" is a dismayed, tormented anthem. "Hellhound", rather than offering relief, sinks ever deeper into the darkness of anguish - but an anguish that's entirely objectified and external, where it isn't us descending into hell, but hell surfacing onto the earth's crust through zombies. The sheer violence of the way this unfolds then simulates a zombie choking its latest victim (who, on top of it all, went and provoked it at the cemetery); Danzig's voice (at times a kind of proto-rat-in-the-throat) mimics that very suffocation. "Die, Die My Darling" is the universal manifesto of the album and of Misfits: in its melodic fabric it could have been ordinary rock; in its execution, Misfits turn it into a rock/metal track as deranged as it is engrossing, one the listener can't help but identify with or grant existential attention to. Here even the backing vocals break free of any reductionism, rising into a higher tragic unity. "We Bite" closes the album at full speed (in a pre-thrash mode), just as it had begun.

After this album, Danzig left the band and launched a long solo career steeped in rock-metal. In vain, Jerry Only would reform the group with Michael Graves on vocals, releasing American Psycho (Geffen, 1997) and Famous Monster (Roadrunner, 1999).

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google