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It's difficult to say anything about Danzig – good or bad – that hasn't been said countless times before. The guy has been around forever, and has always been a prominent and influential figure in music, especially its darker side.

The Danzig-fronted Misfits are one the most influential and well-known names in horror punk and hardcore, and each of Danzig's following incarnations (dark metal with Samhain, darker yet and bluesier as Danzig) are just as well known – and just as distinctive.


The Danzig discography alone spans almost two decades and features 14 albums, including Black Arias 1 and 2, his two classical albums. Combine that with the fact that he's a graphic designer, a comic book publisher, etc., and you'll see that, overall, he is clearly an evil renaissance man.

He is also a perfectionist. For every album he's recorded, he has recorded more songs than ended up on the record. Many of the songs were great, but didn't flow right. After many years of leftover songs, Danzig ended up with this – two disc's worth of material that inevitably needed to be released as "lost tracks".

And instead of simply taking the songs as is and flopping them onto the record as a moneygrab, Danzig rerecorded them. After assembling all of the tapes, he went into the studio and completed them, adding vocals and instruments as needed.

The result is an album that's pure Danzig. It's like a new album – it is a new album - but at the same time it's a historical piece. It's a Danzig's greatest hits that never was.

The tracks are all presented in chronological order, a musical evolution that not even the most-devoted Danzig fans have heard.

A simple perusal of the titles of the 26 songs on the two-disc album reveals true Danzig form. "Pain Is Like An Animal", "You Should Be Dying", "Lick The Blood Off My Hands" and "Crawl Across Your Killing Floor" – the kind of titles that could be incredibly cheesy coming from anyone but Danzig.

A simple listen also reveals true Danzig form; bluesy metal with dark themes. I can see no reason why these songs fell off his albums, and others made the cut, because there is no filler here. Apparently, you'll have to wait for The Rejected Tracks Of Danzig (which I doubt will happen) in order to find the bad stuff because he hasn't included it on The Lost Tracks.

There are even a few nice covers here from a range of artists. Danzig's cover of T-Rex's "Buick McKane" is gritty and heavy, his take on the Germs' "Caught in my Eye" is thick and dark, and his eerie cover of Bowie's "Cat People" transitions from dark and ethereal to brutal metal riffs. It's nothing Bowie would have envisioned, but I don't think he'd disapprove of it, either.

Essentially, the two discs of The Lost Tracks of Danzig give you a new Danzig record, full of pure Danzig-style metal. But despite being all new, it's not new. It's new songs, based on sounds we've heard before (it hurts my head to think too hard about it). If you loved the Danzig albums when you heard them, you'll love all of these new songs. If you've never "gotten" Danzig (well, first of all, what's wrong with you?), then this record won't sell you on it. It's a record for fans.

But saying it's a record for fans is not implying that it's full of demos or poorly recorded songs that only severely obsessed diehard Danzig fans will dig it. Just because the songs didn't make the cut the first time doesn't mean that Danzig hasn't gone all out on them. It may be pure evil, but it still sounds good.

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