On the samhain of my soul...

Danzig, what a band. When I wanted to find out what all the fuss was about I decided to do some digging on messageboards and there someone said that you discover Danzig the best by first listening alot to the first, then to the second, etc. I thought why not? But when I initially put on Danzig (the record), my heart became pumping blood to my brains who said more & more! I restrained myself there - which isn't always easy btw - and I listened to the first record alot, soon the second followed, etc. Maybe in due time I will listen to more than just the first four records but I hate being bummed when a band takes a direction I don't follow and reading here & there, the initial direction changed so the rest of their discography is for the future.

Danzig himself once answered the question what kind of music do they make with this "When I was young I listened to Black Sabbath & blues." Obviously you detect those Black Sabbath influences in their music and Danzig's voice is almost as special as Ozzy's voice (to all Dio lovers: I'm not forgetting or neglecting him but I just like Ozzy better) and I think the recipe of a genre-defining band (which is quite a heavy description) consists of those 2 elements: doing something in a new way (or even better, doing something completely new) AND the singer of the band has to have a distinct voice that blows the rest out of the water.

I still can't get around the fact some people think Mother is a great song but when I let them listen to rest of I: Danzig, they find that shit... To each his own, right?

'On the samhain of my soul...' is a line that comes from Soul On Fire from the I: Danzig record. The structure of that song chills my bones, it follows a pretty "standard" form (if there is even a standard form) but then you get this pretty long verse and a chorus and then that solo that chills everybody's spine, you get again chorusses after that and then that distinctive 'Down in fiiiiiiire' and then that faster part and again a spinechilling solo. Holy shit.
(Sorry if you didn't understand shit of this last part, I know now that writing about something you're so enthousiatic about isn't that easy.)

Edit: An anecdote concerning Danzig that is pretty funny: again at the local library, you have the book 'The Top 500 Of Heavy Metal Albums Of All Time', when I saw it I immediatly wanted to look in it to see how this Top 500 sees like. So I start turning the pages (number 1 is Master Of Puppets of Metallica) and at number somewhere-in-the-onehunderdandfifties there is the I: Danzig but a Danzig fan crossed the initial ranking out with a pencil and wrote besides it 1. A couple of pages later I found II: Lucifuge and also there the initial ranking is crossed out and here it said (in Dutch): 'also 1'.