Lollipop #24   March 1996
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MISFITS
Collection II (Caroline)
Reviewed by Joshua Brown

   One of the mini-snapshots gleaned from my high school
experience that I especially cherish, happened in my senior year.
I had made it out of Maine and plunked myself into a private
school with a decent punk rock per capita population. On the bus
during our way back from some field trip-type extravaganza, we
killed time by singing familiar songs. One of the tunes we
revisited was The Misfits' "Braineaters" ("brains for
dinner/brains for lunch/brains for breakfast/brains for brunch").
At that moment, I knew that I'd picked the right school. For the
past few years, any time I felt the need to howl at the moon
(metaphorically speaking, of course), or enter the B-movie/horror
comic world through music, it was always The Misfits who took me
there. I especially dug my third-generation Maxell copy of their
early, hard-to-find singles. Glenn Danzig's operatic voice was
able to shine through any production value, and the extra static
and basement acoustics made for maximum creepitude. Later, I
hunted down all these rare items and they were the pride of my
collection. Since not everyone was willing to pay $50-100 per 7",
and because their release was so limited, there were CD bootlegs
(not to mention countless vinyl ones) going around that included
the singles and the Beware 12". The success of this bootleg was
what most likely prompted Caroline to finally issue Collection
II, a decade and a half after the original releases. Compiled are
Beware tracks like "Attitude" and "Last Caress," rare gems like
"Rat Fink" and "Return of the Fly," and some Earth A.D. and Walk
Among Us songs - 20 songs in all. This is The Misfits at their
rawest and most haunting. Even though Danzig is now, for all
intents and purposes, Dio on stilts and steroids, no self-parody
- no matter how annoying - can change the fact that he once
fronted the greatest horror punk band ever.