Misfits - DeA.D. Alive! (2013)
Photo credit: J. Kevin Lynch
The album begins with the crowd chanting "JER-RY! JER-RY!" over and over, reminiscent of the iconic intro to Jerry Springer's show, and then as the first song (the title track off of "The Devil's Rain") launches and starts going, one immediately has to wonder three things immediately: Why, for a live album (or ANY album for that matter) released in 2016, does it have the bass-track in the left headphone/speaker and the guitar-track in the right headphone/speaker? Why does Jerry Only's bass guitar sound like a preset for FL Slayer in FL Studio? Was this album overdubbed?! Holy shit, I have no answers but plenty of questions.
"You've been shitting on Jerry Only too much, motherfucker! Be positive for once!!" You say to me and I have to oblige, if anything, out of love and respect for you: Jerry Only actually sounds pretty alright on this album because there's a certain rawness to it, and it isn't coated in weird studio effects like "The Devil's Rain", perhaps a bit obviously because it's a live album, but since I can't shake the fact that this album feels like some parts most definitely must've been overdubbed, it's still surprising. The album consists of various songs from "The Devil's Rain", no Danzig-era songs, and a few from "American Psycho" and "Famous Monsters".. And they're actually done pretty well here! You are NOT reading that wrong: When you strip away the weird production on Jerry Only's voice and play the songs faster (which is something they do quite often on this live album), some of them turn out to be.. Not great, but good tunes, maybe not by Misfits standards, but good enough. "Vivid Red", "Land of the Dead", and even "Curse of the Mummy's Hand" become pretty okay tunes.
The real place where the live album shines is any time they get into the Michale Graves-era, with the songs "The Shining", "American Psycho", "Dig Up Her Bones", "Scream!", "Helena" and even "Saturday Night" being the final song on the album, which, if it was actually the last song of the night like Jerry Only states in the beginning, that's a pretty shitty song to end a Misfits show on. Typically you wanna close on a high note, y'know? Maybe "I Turned into a Martian" or some shit, not a slow song that people can stand to miss in order to beat traffic leaving from the gig. That being said, "American Psycho" and "Dig Up Her Bones" are performed particularly triumphantly, and makes you wish there was more Michale Graves-era material on this album, because even the most vocal of his haters will say that his writing/songs in general were miles ahead of anything Jerry Only has been putting out.
Come for the chance to hear songs off of "The Devil's Rain" performed very, very slightly better than the originals, stick around to hear some Michale Graves-era classics sped-up. It was smart of them to pad out the concert (if this even was the full concert, which I highly doubt) with all of the good tunes towards the end, because it almost makes you forget how sluggish some of the earlier songs on the album are.
6/10
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