DANZIG — Skeletons (review)

DANZIG — Skeletons album cover Album · 2015 · Heavy Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
UMUR
"Skeletons" is the 10th full-length studio album by US hard/heavy rock act Danzig. The album was released through Evilive/Nuclear Blast Records in November 2015. It´s the successor to "Deth Red Sabaoth" from 2010. "Skeletons" is however not the next Danzig album featuring original material, but instead an album with covers of artists that Glenn Danzig grew up listening to and who have inspired him over the years. Glenn sings and plays most intruments himself (including drums on about half of the tracks), but has enlisted Tommy Victor (Prong) to play lead guitars (and some rhythm guitar and bass too), and Johnny Kelly (Type O Negative) to play drums on the tracks where Glenn doesn´t.

The 10 tracks on the 33:51 minutes long album are covers of artists like Davie Allan & The Arrows, ZZ Top, Black Sabbath, and The Everly Brothers, so the original material comes from many different sides of the musical spectrum (there´s of course also a cover of Elvis Presley featured on the album). The cover of "N.I.B." by Black Sabbath is by far the most metal oriented track on "Skeletons", while the rest are more rock or punk oriented. Danzig of course puts his own spin on the material and it´s clearly audible at any time during the album that you´re listening to a Danzig release although there are more than a few nods toward his former act Misfits too. Especially the cover of "Devil's Angels" by Davie Allan & The Arrows has that punk meets 50s rhythm´n´blues that Misfits often played.

The material is a bit up and down in quality, or maybe more correctly, some tracks suit Danzig better than others. I was for example a little surprised at how limb the cover of "N.I.B." sounded, while the above mentioned "Devil's Angels", which opens the album, is an almost perfect fit and one of the highlights. There are a couple of pretty major issues regarding the album, other than some tracks not being the perfect match for the band, and that´s the almost constant use of pinch harmonics and the rather weak sounding production. The former is of course courtesy of Tommy Victor and has been a trademark in Danzig´s sound since he joined the lineup. It´s never been a feature that I felt enhanced the band´s music and it´s even more inappropriate here. The sound production is as mentioned also an issue as it sounds rather muffled and weak. Often resembling demo sound quality. It really is quite underwhelming.

So other than some relatively good quality tracks that Danzig successfully put their own spin on, "Skeletons" is far from being the interesting covers album it could have been. It´s not a bad quality release either though (although the sound production is of a rather questionable quality on some tracks), and there is some entertainment value hidden around the release, so a 3 star (60%) rating is warranted.
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