Misfits - The Devil's Rain (2011)

I've waited years for this.. Not for it to come out, but to actually listen to it.

The day that I heard that this album had dropped, it was my brother's birthday, and he, a good friend, and I all went to a concert that night. The concert consisted exclusively of nerdcore rappers, which were Adam Warrock (who was arguably the most technically talented out of all of them), Mega Ran (who did a great bit in his set where people were throwing stuff at him and he'd freestyle about it), mc chris (who was hilarious but told a really awkward rape joke that no one really laughed at), and MC Lars (who is one of the nicest people I've ever met, seriously), and it was genuinely such a great experience. I had heard beforehand that the new Misfits album had come out and I couldn't shake the feeling that the album was gonna be shit, and I didn't even listen to it that night, because I didn't want to ruin my night, and I tried to a few days later but couldn't make it even a few songs into it. Truth be told, I've avoided it like the plague all of these years until just recently, because now that it's been five years, maybe the whole "the new Misfits album is shit" thing has faded, y'know? Maybe I'd be able to enjoy it for what it is.

WELL I'M SURE SHIT OUTTA LUCK ON THAT ONE!! THIS ALBUM FUCKING SUCKS!! Jerry Only isn't even attempting to sound like Glenn Danzig anymore, which I don't know if it's a good or bad thing because this voice he sings in on the album is just as awkward. The album is full of a bunch of slower tempo songs where Jerry Only reads off the back-descriptions of horror movie DVD cases in the bargain bin at Walmart and makes them rhyme, and I GENUINELY believe that could've been an actual thing he did for these songs, or at least some of them. Don't get me wrong, I liked "American Psycho" and "Famous Monsters" so I was fine with lyrics being a bit cheesy on occasion, but this is some next-level corniness. Where Glenn Danzig had lyrics about horror movies, they were typically delivered in a dark tone with horrific undertones, and when Michale Graves had lyrics about horror movies, they were cheesy but charming, but one thing they had in common was that when they sang about shit like that, they were typically singing from the perspective of whatever character/creature they were singing about. Now, when Jerry Only writes lyrics about horror movies, it seems like all he really does is sing the movie's plot and is playing it very safely by the rules, thinking "Our fans like this, right?!" while making it as innocent as possible.

Alright, let's get onto the subject of the actual music: For a band containing Dez Cadena of Black Flag on guitar, this album is pretty fuckin' low-tempo for everyone involved. You'd think that Jerry Only, who's been in the band since 1977, has performed countless shows, been involved in every single Misfits release, etc, he'd KNOW what fans want and what they disliked, but oddly enough, no. He's strangely blind to it, despite playing all of the classics every night on tour. The songs are generally slow-tempo tunes that try to be closer to heavy metal than punk rock, aside from "Jack the Ripper" which actually has (a very tired-sounding) Dez Cadena on vocals, which is perplexing to me because while it's not great, it's still in the RIGHT direction!! I feel like they made that one a fast punk song because they had it in mind "This one is gonna be a fan-favorite" but it never occurred to them that "Wait, if it's gonna be a fan-favorite, maybe we should make more songs like it", and instead, churn out songs like the corny "Cold in Hell" and the out-of-place "Where Do They Go?" instead of what everyone actually wants to hear, and I promise you that despite him not being a bad vocalist, no one wanted to hear Jerry Only dramatically sing about horror movie monsters.

The worst part is that while this album is bad, it's not even terrible, it's just monotonous, mundane, and boring. It's like the audible equivalent of Raisin Bran, and for the band that's brought us so many classic albums that I shouldn't even have to list when talking about their achievements, that's fucking horrible, not even to just have an outright shitty punk rock album, but to wait twelve fucking YEARS for a new full-length album ("Project 1950" doesn't count because it was full of covers) and have it just be a boring by-the-numbers attempt at reinventing themselves to be even cheesier than before, while forgetting everything that made them a band to truly be reckoned with back in the day, and by that, I mean "forgetting that the past members of the band pre-2002 essentially made the band what it was, not Jerry Only on his own."

If you can go from "Earth A.D./Wolfs Blood" to this and tell me that this is a good album, you are truly fucking delusional.

5/10
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Feel free to check out the song previews/buy this album using my Amazon Associate link!