Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.rock
Titolo: Misfits

Misfits - The Misfits Box Set (1996)
The Misfits.  It's almost iconic that TV sitcoms and movies are going to 
show the "rebel" or "delinquent" teenager/adolescent with a Misfits poster 
in his room, or wearing a Misfits T-shirt.  Yes, watch some old "Saved By 
the Bell" re-runs to confirm.  Watch David Cross' cameo in the movie "Men In 
Black".  The evidence is there.  For those reasons, I never bothered with 
The Misfits for a long time, despite the growing number of friends over the 
years who have loved them tremendously.  Once I finally gave them a shot, 
since my wife had the box set, I could finally hear for myself what it was 
all about.  And I love it.
There are three basic components to The Misfits' sound.  They had the songs, 
they had the singer, and they had the gimmick.
The group's debut single is a weird and highly forgettable slab of 
disco-inflected sleaze rock, with a bas recording of a good song on the 
B-side.  But they hadn't found a guitarist yet.  Probably around the time 
they did find their guitarist, or in any event by around 1978-79, they seem 
to have written the bulk of their classic songs.  They went on to record and 
re-record these in the early 1980s, with only some of them seeing proper 
release.  But the song were always there.  They are propulsive, with a song 
sense of melody, and a lethargic, pseudo-lazy, slacker's sense of rhythm. 
Even when the lyrics were stupid or adolescent or both, the songwriting 
still provided great melodies.  The songs also frequently leaned toward 
catchy sing-along choruses, a good measure of the reason for the group's 
continued cult following.
The songwriting might have been irrelevant has The Misfits not had a great 
singer in Glenn Danzig.  He was the main difference between The Misfits and 
so many other punk bands.  Other than Nina Hagen, no other punk singer had 
his range.  Danzig's vocals are what allowed The Misfits to actually put 
into practice their developed sense of melody in a way few others could 
realize, even if they had the inclination.  So the undercurrents of 1960s 
East coast doo-wop revival are there in the recordings and so convincing as 
to make them easy to overlook.
The gimmick the band had was a fixation on horror movie themes.  The band 
logo kind of says it all.  Now, The Cramps certainly were also doing 
something similar, but where The Cramps focused on the countercultural 
implications of late-night TV and monster movies (at least up through their 
early 80s record label feud), The Misfits focused on silly comic-book 
horror.  A small but noticeable difference.  Funny though, how those two 
band which must have seemed the most trivial at the time have held up so 
much better than so many other gimmick-less punk bands of the day.
As for everything else, the sound of The Misfits triggers associations with 
kind of the basic punk sound.  Comparisons to The Damned, or any other 
notable punk band of the late-1970s makes for a fair characterization of a 
lot of The Misfits' recordings.  After they had exhausted recording their 
earliest compositions, the well sort of ran dry, so-to-speak.  They only 
really wrote a few great songs into the 1980s.  It wasn't long before their 
gimmick stopped being a joke, and they seemed to start taking themselves far 
too seriously.  By the time of the original group's final full-length album, 
only their second, they had turned into a rather faceless, unremarkable 
punk-metal band.  What happened to drain them of their creativity and 
originality makes a good question, and one that I can't answer.  The group 
reformed with a series of often high-profile replacement members.  But who 
cares.  Fortunately, this Misfits Box Set is only about the original band.
Operating as an independent act, with their own record label, The Misfits 
had tremendous difficulties releasing material.  Despite a number of highly 
productive recording sessions in the 1970s, they didn't release much of 
those recordings during their existence.  And what they did manage to 
release was often the more inferior material, looked at in hindsight.  And 
so this box set is invaluable.  It's all pretty damn good.  Listening to the 
whole thing straight through will find you listening to a lot of the same 
songs over and over again, but hey, they are still good songs!
If you ask me, and if you've read this far you are sort-of, the best Misfits 
recordings were scattered across singles, EPs, one of their two albums, and 
vault-clearing compilations like this box set.  Some of the material 
released hides behind needless echo/reverb.  And some songs just feel right 
at certain tempos.  But the great thing with this box set is that you can 
pick the version of each song that feels right for you.  They are all right 
here.
If you hear a few Misfits songs and like them, go straight for this box set 
and save yourself all the trouble of attacking them piecemeal. 

 Misfits - The Misfits Box Set (1996)
Ecco, questi sono sempre trascurati nel niusgruppo.
Io li adoro. Ci sono altri piccoli fan?
Mettete la manina qui sotto.

cuccuhead ha scritto:

eccomi! ovviamente sono il periodo con danzig... e sě, ho la bara ^_^
ciao
looke
np - rites of spring


io metto il piede
li vidi suonare 25 anni fa, aria torva, teschi dappertutto, anche
sulle chitarre, li definerei circo e baraccone funebre. Il tutto duro`
poco, perche` dopo tre pezzi ci fu una rissa col pubblico e se ne
andarono.
P.s.: I am McLovin`

 P.s.: I am McLovin`
:)