It’s October 1st, bats and ghouls, and you know what that means…
…it’s time to kick off our fourth annual Halloween Countdown!
Are you prepared for the parade of fiendish delights unleashed from the darkest depths of the Armagideon Time archives? (I hope so, otherwise it’s going to be a rather boring month.)
This marks the first Halloween Countdown since the switchover. While I regret the absence of the downloadable groovy ghoulishness of previous countdowns, there are some monsters even I fear to run afoul of.
This thirty-one day terror tour will not be conducted in total silence, however, as I will be scaring up a host of streaming screamers to edify and terrify….and what better place to start than with this undying classic?
Recommended listening: The Misfits – Horror Business (from a 1979 single; collected on the 1986 Misfits compilation
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The past two decades have seen The Misfits’ depressing devolution into what my better half calls a “t-shirt band” (along with Crass, and to a lesser extent, Joy Division). Merchandise featuring The Misfits’ distinctive iconography (cribbed from the Crimson Ghost movie serial) has become a bigger concern than the actual music, and one gets the sense that the vast majority of buyers have never even listened to the band.
Or they know them solely from Metallica’s cover of “Last Caress” on Garage Days Re-revisited, which is even more depressing to contemplate.
It’s the Hot Topic crowd’s loss, because The Misfits recorded some damn fine music (before they established the toxic precedent in which terrific horrorpunk bands decide to become subpar metal acts), adding a b-movie spookshow slant to the Ramones’ retro-leaning, junk culture-loving punk-pop formula. While 1982′s Walk Among Us is one of the tightest American punk LPs ever released (and one of the rare few albums I can listen to from beginning to end without feeling the urge to hit the skip button), I have no less affection for the fast and loose garage rock sound featured in today’s musical journey into nightmare.