Dammit, the need to give this record five stars never would have come to me and turned into such a pressing desire had I not received a perfectly beautiful vinyl copy of this great lost gem from mine very own halcyon high school daze what with the Anthrax shirts, the Slayer logo drawn on my arm, much more threatening than the Ozzy fingers of middle school, the cassettes, cassettes and more cassettes: everything from King Diamond to Napalm Death to Obituary and to then all time favorites Overkill and their scorching, burning _Years of Decay_. I think I wrote somewhere else about the coming of the force that was Glenn Danzig into my life, and yea verily, unquestionably it was a force that still reverberates all through me to the extent that now, after twenty-some years of listening to all these supposedly silly albums I find that I'm as transfixed and enraptured every bit as much as I was in high school or right thereafter.

Glub Glub Glub goes this album, first song on first side and there's wind and some thunder, there's some scary effects and there's Glenn coming in with some sort of incantation, a Satanic brain damaged Milton invoking the muse of himself and the devil, great beast, whatever, "Beyond race, beyond religion, beyond human's fears, I AM THE END!" Oh, if only Walt Whitman would've thought of that one, we could have had some really lovely visuals of swarthy young men dancing widdershins 'neath the blood moon as the civil war rages on around them. This record is something like that: a legitimate thing, an object that contains something so sick and down there, down a spiral stair, at the bottom in a rock walled tomb, and even lower where the soil itself is accursed and the smell of mulch and wormkind ever works its way in hot hellish wafts up to the nose. There is death in these grooves, and not a pretty clean killing sort of death (though there's plenty of killing) but more a rotting corpse at the bottom of a forgotten stair in a crumbling castle form of death.

Side One is a good slab of weird Danzig-y post punk, produced in a tin can filled with amylnitrate and formaldehyde or something, but still managing to have a nice attack, a good kick here and there, some rock out parts to go along with the goblin shouted choruses that are very similar but more demonic than the choruses on Misfits songs. It is a good time, side one of Initium, but the best stuff is definitely saved for the second side, especially the last three songs.

The Shift and The Howl are both longer than most of the tracks that have come already, but thematically both seem to be about werewolves or demons of some sort and turning into a monster. Not a subject that Glenn ever shied away from during the late seventies and early eighties. I always like "The Shift" better because of the really lovely drum beat and the way it puts a nice trance over the listener and turns into a very visual song, definitely check it out if you're into that sort of thing. "The Howl" is much more frantic and characteristic of an "average Samhain song" (whatever that might be) but in all it's talk of human slaughterhouses and hearing howls, I'm not quite sure if Glenn is the killer or the victim of the murderhouse where we find ourselves, again I wish his words could really convey what he sees just a little more, though really they do better than anyone has a right to expect.

"I am not your son of God The prince of light will show no fear Mine is that which rules this world The beast is come, I am the end

Archangel Archangel" --"Archangel"

Here we have Glenn worshiping the devil, shaking his fist at God and trying to open the seven seals to let demons come forth and take over the land as he was sent to do by God (the same one he's not the son of) but the fucking brood can't quite pull it off, I think, or maybe he pulls it off single-handedly after making all the members of the brood a nice warm home in the pits of hell. No matter, what does matter is that there's this really beautiful guitar on it that Glenn himself is playing, and there's these neat little breathy "wooo" things going on and that drum beat is definitely made for all the little demons to dance to. You know they need to dance and so did Glenn. At around five minutes, it's the longest Samhain song ever and a damn good one, so good in fact I'm going to go listen to it again.

An H.R. Geiger cover graces this third album of the Danzig band and Chuck Biscuits still pounds that single bass battery like a bandit, and Christ and Von are still being the best backers that this short Wolverine character would ever get (Gods can't everyone involved understand how much they've sucked since they split up?) But this is not a perfect album. Even the best track on it, the title one the one that goes "Oh, oh would you let it go?" is flawed with over hot mic-manship and support from the great Lumpet. I'm not blasting Glenn and Crew's production job, they did the best they could, but if Rubin were in the studio at that moment we'd have that exact performance sounding so slick and perfect that to hear it is to lay on the sidewalk, crying out the bitter tears of your past excesses whilst praying to either God or the Devil to exonerate you from the long nights of fuckup that you can not get over anymore. Maybe it is Grace itself that makes this album a flawed one on so many production levels, because if it were perfect as the first two Danzig albums were, it would surely be the best, and those warts, those hideous little rough patches of skin on its otherwise smooth bum, make it an actually listenable album instead of some super slick, hyper aware masterpiece that actually caused the destruction of at least two worlds in some weird Douglas Adams type universe.

Love. This album is love. There is nothing that is more love than this album. All those hippies who sit around pretending John Lennon knew more than anyone else, that Janis Joplin was the true flower of the world, that Jimi (who really is a truly great guitarist on the highest level, and a hell of a song writer to boot) was somehow more about love than this thing, this brutal, ugly, gorgeous, perfect pop masterpiece of an album.

There's a lot of good to be had here. From the very first notes of "Long Way Back From Hell" to the very final fading guitar note of "Pain in the World" this is an album that really is nearly (not quite, but oh, so close) fifty minutes of sheer satanic bliss, black as coal, and heavy as a meteor.

Personal Anecdote That Has Nothing to do with How Good This Album Is:

First time I heard this was in 1990 sometime, maybe very very early '91 and I'd never heard a note of Glenn song, and I borrowed this cassette from my buddy Matt and put it in the tape deck of my boom box and pressed play. It stopped because it was actually at the beginning of Side 2. I turned it over because I didn't feel like rewinding and the very first thing I heard, the very first moment of Glenn-song was the acoustic intro to "Devil's Plaything." I listened, rapt. Intent. I knew that the universe now made more sense and that I would have to spend my life holding this song, this sound, up as a flag, a gorgeous multi colored black flag that would lead me all around the world, all across the badlands of musical populi and would eventually discover all sorts of things because of those notes. And by the time Glenn sang "Woah woah uh whoa woah" I was in love, in rapture, I'm sure I had an erection but didn't know why, and from that day forth I put away childish things like Death Metal and Grindcore and started exploring the whole of the universe. Of course Death Metal and Grindcore still totally got my goat, but that's another story. Glenn, well, he's like Elvis and Sinatra and Morrison. He's like the other side of every brutal moment. I love this stuff. I can't get enough, no matter how smart, ascended and filled with divine fire I get, there's still "Lucifuge" reminding me that I ain't shit. And yet, because I am here, Maybe I am. Goodness, gracious, land sakes alive, I need to hear "Snakes of Christ" and succumb to the bloat of underworld goat. Hallelujah, save my soul, this is some serious rock n roll.

The first Danzig album. How does one speak of something that is so ingrained that their psyche actually doesn't exist in any universe where this album didn't happen? How does one speak of perfection? Danzig I, as I call it, is a perfect album. Dry. Disgusting. Hard Rock. Sort of Metal. Metal. There's Glenn belting out obtuse weird lyrics about Satan and chicks and mothers and fathers and demon sex as though he really were riding the backs of those demons, clinging to their scaly bodies as their wide spanned leathern wings beat the flaming heat down there in hell, where of course Glenn would be king as soon as his mortal coil gave in and threw his soul down into the demonic waste that was his birthright (especially if you believe the crap he bellows out on the Samhain albums!) And yet, I only give this album, this perfect piece of music that begins with the guttural rumble of "Yeahaw!" as "Twist of Cain" begins and winds up Forty-odd minutes later with the wailing bellows at the end of "Evil Thing" having taken the listener through the lowest underbelly of Satan's underground. How could it not have five stars? Well, that's simple really. I can't give it five and give "II-Lucifuge" five stars, too. So this album will always be a first stab, an attempt at true perfection that manages to be perfect, but like the difference between a flawless ruby and a flawless emerald, as a guy who prefers rubies to emeralds, or maybe onyx, I can only say, "For as good as this record is, which is about as good as records can get, the next one is better." I'll call it four and a half, but know that it's really five if you want it to be. Why shouldn't it be five, it is, after all, perfect.

I haven't decided if Hagar ever got to be involved with the making of a five star album. The very best of his Van Halen output is around four, from what I've heard of his solo work, four stars seems about the normal with maybe an extra half star going to one or two of them. I'm sure there are a few that don't get the fourth star, and probably a couple that don't get more than two and a half, but that is sheer speculation. What we have here, though, is the second Montrose album, and a good one it is. This should have been the slight, ever so slight, misstep after a stellar, action packed proto-metal and even a little bit o' space rock debut. There's still proto-metal, there's still space rock, there's still Ronnie Montrose and Sammy Hagar, but there's just a little bit missing. Not much, mind you, but if you draw an analogy to this and the first two Dio albums that would be released around ten years later, it's very much the same. There's a template, see. And there was the thing that made the template, then there was that which used the template to be made. Not much different in a very real and severe way, but incredibly different in the most important way, you know the one where words fail and poets come from the dark abyss to sing the virtues and flubs of all around them. Yea, there, the first one's better because it's original and the second one is nearly as good. I haven't heard the third yet, which is the first without good ol' Sammy, but I'm looking forward to the day that happens. Over all something to enjoy and be like "Wooo! Yea! This is awesome!" about.