WOM, October 1994
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[Translated from German by Thomas Birkle.]

Satan Spelled Backwards

Six years after their release "Mother" hit the top ten in the US charts 
and let DANZIG become mega-stars. With the new album "4" the band 
around muscle-packed Glenn wants to strengthen and widen their 
top-position.

Probably part of the success of DANZIG is their image, which is hitting 
the news in the US regularly. "We sometimes started to dress black 
and using the skull as our logo", guitarist John Christ says. "That 
doesn't mean that we try to change harmless citizen's children into 
followers of Satan at our shows and that afterwards at home the first 
thing we do is sacrifice a goat. The press simply over-hyped the whole 
image-thing. That we care a lot for the world that we live in, we never 
made a great deal of. We've had and we still have the opinion that our 
music does not go along with Hawaiian shirts and sunflowers". So it's 
not by accident that their new CD doesn't come with the usual plastic 
case but as a slipcase made of recycled paper.
What stays the same are the band member priorities: DANZIG is and will 
always be the project of Glenn Danzig, who in earlier times with the 
Misfits and Samhain always has been seen as a dictator. A fact that the 
guitarist Christ obviously can easily live with: "Glenn formed the 
band and he writes the songs. Sometimes sure it is frustrating when your 
ideas get knocked down, because they   don't fit into Glenn's plans, but 
nobody convinces me playing with him." On the other hand Christ not 
just earns quite well with DANZIG, he also works out a solo album for 
long, that's supposed to come out after the Danzig world tour.
Drummer Chuck Biscuit probably didn't share this opinion, he got fired 
by the master after finishing the recordings of "4", because  he 
disagreed in signing the contract which has been worked out by Danzig's 
new management. "It's quite sad, because Chuck and I are close friends 
and he was playing with the band for seven years now, but with 
ex-SUGARTOOTH drummer Joey Castillo we found a great replacement."

Small but obvious changes have also been made in the DANZIG-sound on the 
new recordings: "The record is different to our recent releases. The 
arrangements are more simple, though we have more experimented, also in 
the song-writing. Usually Glenn simply hums a tune into the tape recorder
and we follow up with a song. This time our bassist Eerie Von had the 
idea of playing one of our songs backwards, what most of these 
church-nerds in America always believe we were doing to find out satanic 
messages. That inspired us so much that we recorded whole guitar solo 
and drum parts backwards in the songs on this record. In the end we were 
so obsessed on this that we were trying to really play the whole song 
"Let It Be Captured" backwards. Therefor a new song was created - 
"Cantspeak." That's a lot of puzzling to do for those pseudo-preachers...