During the mid-1990s, Misfits founding bassist Jerry Only successfully sued Danzig for the rights to perform and tour under the Misfits name. Ever since, the reconstituted Only-lead group, staffed by a rotating cast of punk-rock yeomen, has traipsed across the globe, delivering a Misfits-like product. It's not that the Only-Misfits are terrible-- the music hews closely to the group's original Buddy Holly-meets-B-movie template, albeit with an added dash of metal riffage-- but it is goofier. Without Danzig's combustible presence, the band softened into predictability, their previous menace petering out into Scooby Doo villain-hood. In 1999, they even popped up in a WCW cage match (and got creamed).
Misfits' first album of new material in 12 years, The Devil's Rain, finds the band-- Only, former Black Flag guitarist Dez Cadena, and Murphy's Law drummer Eric Arce-- coldly chugging through the motions. In their original incarnation, Misfits made blistering music out of seemingly contradictory impulses. They were muscle heads who bashed out primitive rhythms but sang like third-string crooners and obsessed over B-movie imagery. The sound was aggressive, but romantic in its own tacky, zonked-out way.
But nothing on The Devil's Rain growls with the unschooled simplicity of the early years-- songs like "Come Back" and "Horror Business" pitched and yawed on violent, stone-age rhythms. Only, who has taken over frontman duties, just doesn't have the bite in his voice. Where Danzig deftly toed a line between crooning and barking, Only strays too far into the latter category. On "Curse of the Mummy's Hand", he sounds like Pat Boone doing Halloween karaoke. His songwriting is largely driven by straight-faced retellings of midnight movie clichés that come off silly rather than sinister. Like the previous Misfits Mk. II records-- American Psycho and Famous Monsters-- the production is notched up to contemporary pop-punk standards, but added polish makes the music feel remote and impersonal.
It didn't have to be this way. Since the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan have lost some of their cachet as punk rock cannon fodder, but Misfits' go-to protagonists, the undead, are having something of a renaissance as of late. Between The Walking Dead, True Blood, and Twilight, horror business is good. The Misfits' schtick should stand the test of time. But The Devil's Rain makes supernatural feel like fairly workaday stuff.
