Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Static Age!

Theme: The Monster Mash - Bobby "Boris" Pickett

The hairstyle came later.

The Misfits might have been through any number of lineup, sound and image changes over time, but I don't care about any of that; they got it right the first time. Static Age was cut in 1978 in a handful of takes but never released until 1997 (though most of the songs were re-recorded for the inferior Legacy of Brutality), in a decision as inexplicable as any in the lengthy history of popular music, since it was first recorded at the height of the punk rock phenomenon and contained most of the band's most sledgehammer of bangers, including catchy jingle "Last Caress" and the last word in B-movie tributes "Return of the Fly".

This historic blunder could have easily served to strangle the nascent institution in its crib, since debut mark 2 Walk Among Us, while containing some fine songs, sounds like it was recorded in about eight different locations on variously archaic machinery, which is endearingly chaotic but distracting even to my utterly inexpert ear. It's a wonder the band caught on at all, for which we can only thank Danzig's underrated songcraft and some canny image-crafting over time. Misfits tees are fourth only to Nirvana, Iron Maiden and the Ramones in the is-it-a-band-or-a-brand sweepstakes, but, like the Ramones and Maiden, it doesn't matter because cool is cool (Nirvana is not cool; MTV lied to you).

The OG Misfits have aged better than any of their punk contemporaries because their music is principally about B horror flicks and being edgy bois, as opposed to laundering your teachers' ideology through a veneer of rebellion, which became the purview of the genre retrospectively and then increasingly intentionally as the years wore on. Even admirably ill-meaning edgelords of yore like Fear and the Anti Nowhere League would drop the odd cringe boomerism like "fuck religion" or "we don't care if you're black or white", which can only give any self-respecting thoughtcriminal of today what wahmen call "the ick". No such reflexive cucking can be found in laugh-out-loud wifebeatercore like "Attitude". Sure, "Come Back" drags on too long and sounds like Danzig trying to ape Jim Morrison, but if that's the worst thing I can say about a record, it's a keeper.