Devil's Rain

It's hard for me to get excited about new Misfits material, I'm sure any longtime readers of this blog know how we felt (all three of us) about the band when we were growing up, and how we feel about what they've been doing since they reformed. However, I was putting together a Hallowe'en playlist lately and it had a lot of Misfits on, naturally, and I even threw tracks in like "Dig Up Her Bones", because regardless of how I feel about the multi faceted marketing machine the Misfits "brand" has become, the two albums without Danzig have got some decent songs on.
SO… let's move on a bit and review their latest album, Devil's Rain, which, rather unbelievably, is their first album of all new material since 1999, when this photo of Patchie, Skum and Jerry Only was taken. See how much we love the Misfits that we are wearing the band's shirts to their gig, an honour normally reserved only for Maiden and Motörhead.



Anyway, I digress.

Devil's Rain is a whopping sixteen(!) track monster of an album, but is it any good? Well, the answer is yeah, it's alright.
Probably not the most intellectual review you're going to hear, but it's the truth.
I'm going to get it out the way now and say it right at the beginning of the review; it's too long, and although I enjoyed it greatly and will listen to some of the tracks again (more of that later), it is to my mind, the weakest album the Misfits have ever recorded.

But, when you consider that the company it's keeping includes Static Age, Walk Among Us, and Earth A.D., that's not too bad an achievement.
But, sixteen tracks…sheesh.
If they had trimmed it a bit it would have been as good (if not better) than Famous Monsters or American Psycho; all the woah-woh's are there, the fast bits and slow bits, the horror imagery (and an absolute fucking STORMER of a song in "Father" which works not because it's a classic Misfits track, but because it sounds like an old NWOBHM track. Had this song been a b-side on a Neat Records or Bronze single in the early eighties, Thee Claw would be burning it onto every mix cd we ever make) are all there, but it's spread too thinly over too many tracks. I know they've had a lot of time out of the studio so there's been an awful lot of time to write songs, but it's too much, even though the songs are quite short. And don't let Dez sing on stuff if he isn't going to sound like Dez.

For completists and the curious, but you MUST all hear "Father".