Samhain Samhain Box Set (E-Magine Entertainment)
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Samhain was the group Danzig led after disbanding–or disemboweling–the Misfits, in 1983, and before he began recording under his own name, in ’88, and not surprisingly the music represents a transition between the Misfits’ ghoulishly catchy punk and the urgent metal of the current incarnation of Danzig. As a result, critics and record buyers–who tend to align themselves with one camp or the other–have paid scant attention to the band’s work.
But many of rock’s most unique and rewarding records–like Tom Waits’s Swordfishtrombones or Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home–have been transitional efforts in which artists ended up between familiar compass points in a world entirely of their own making. The Samhain box contains remastered reissues of all four of the band’s concise studio records, plus a disc of live material culled from a 1985 set at New York’s Danceteria and a 1986 set recorded in Chicago at Metro. Each is an aural snapshot of a stage in Danzig’s transformation from obscure punk gremlin into arena-ready metal magus.
Ripping punk rave-ups like “November’s Fire” and “Kiss of Steel” sound like they could’ve been lifted from Husker Du’s contemporaneous New Day Rising–if it weren’t for Danzig’s basso diablo crooning and the quirky, shifting rhythmic patterns that flow through the songs. Monumental sing-along metal eruptions like “Mother of Mercy” and “Halloween II” (another Misfits rewrite) presage the lean, hard-driving sound of Danzig’s subsequent solo work, minus the grandiosity. There are also some tunes that are just weird. “To Walk the Night” is a dreamy graveyard ballad (Danzig’s first) cloaked in queasy instrumental textures that hang like so much sepulchral moss. During the middle verse, the rhythm lurches into an off-center groove that briefly but effectively disorients the ear, driving home the unsettled anxiety the song’s lyrics are trying to portray. “Unbridled” is a bizarre blast of hardcore rhythm, atonal guitar bursts, and hellhound background vocals seemingly exhaled from the bowels of the earth. In just two minutes, the song completely unshackles itself from popular music convention with a whirling, headlong dive into avant-garde punk.
