While most people focus on either The Misfits or Danzig, there’s a third band that Danzig fronted that gets little mention or love. Formed out of the ashes of The Misfits, Samhain only existed as a functioning band for a mere four years. But in that time, Danzig, bassist Eerie Von (real name Eric Stellmann), and roving cast of guitarists and drummers created haunting horror rock that borrowed heavily from both hardcore punk and goth metal. In many ways, Samhain were a band that both prefigured later developments (Paradise Lost and the whole death/doom hybrid, for example) and failed to catch on due to their time period (they were neither as fast as thrash nor as slow as doom). Because of all this, Samhain is the little talked about and mostly forgotten offspring of Glenn Danzig.
Here’s the problem with that: Samhain produced two of the best albums of Danzig’s entire career and some of their songs are considered standards by those in the know (including Metallica). Their first album, 1984’s “Initium,” not only presented a shocking cover (see below), but it also boasted of some pretty hefty tunes, from “The Howling”-inspired “The Howl” to the ballad “Archangel,” which Danzig had originally written for the British goth punk band The Damned.
There’s a little bit of comic book juvenilia with “In My Grip,” and the song makes an easy parallel with the band’s calling-card—a horned skull image that was taken from artist Michael Golden’s cover for Issue 8 of Marvel’s “The Saga of Crystar.”
The next song up, “Mother of Mercy,” is anything but cartoony, and this heavy rock anthem is one of the record’s most enduring legacies. From its appearance on 2009’s “Guitar Hero: Metallica” to its numerous cover versions, “Mother of Mercy” is at once the quintessential Samhain song and arguably the first Danzig song, for its strange and sexual imagery prefigures Danzig’s later obsessions. Other early indicators of Glenn Danzig’s continued interest in blues metal and neo-1950s crooning are the tracks “Human Pony Girl” and “To Walk the Night.” While “Human Pony Girl” is a slow, almost sludgy number that doesn’t even try to hide its intentions, “To Walk the Night” is a Byronic track that invokes the figure of the solitary and nocturnal wanderer. Is it a vampire? A ghost? Or a serial killer? “To Walk the Night” doesn’t put its cards on the table, and the song remains chilling for that very reason.
“Let the Day Begin,” which is a sort of sequel to the song “Initium/Samhain,” celebrates the end of the world with fantasies involving the mutilation and evisceration of the world’s religions. Whether or not the apocalyptic day-dreams of “Let the Day Begin” influenced such misanthropic acts as Electric Wizard, Eyehategod, and Darkthrone is unknown, but it is interesting that such a stream has run throughout heavy and hard music ever since the 1980s.
The remainder of “November-Coming Fire” helps to uphold the album’s image as an ominous sonic grimoire. The garbled Latin of “Halloween II” fits in with the band’s love of the autumn festival, while “November’s Fire” explicitly invokes the ancient Celtic festival Samhain (pronounced SAH-win) as an allegory about the end of light and the beginning of darkness. There’s not many things more metal than that, and despite the difficulty of assigning Samhain a genre tag, “November-Coming-Fire” is one of the best examples of the inchoate metal scene of the late 1980s. Back then sub-genres were not yet set in stone with distinct dos and don’ts, and as a result “November-Coming-Fire” contains traces of everything from punk to proto-doom. This fact alone gives it the right to return from the dustbin of history, and more than anything else, “November-Coming-Fire” shows how mood and atmosphere can transcend the masturbatory sessions of virtuosity that so many metal musicians are guilty of.
Words: Benjamin Welton