Last Caress

A horror-movie premise delivered with such straight-faced commitment that it circles all the way around to something genuinely unsettling. The production is raw even by the standards of its era — guitars thin and buzzing, the mix front-loaded with Glenn Danzig's vocal performance in a way that refuses to let you keep a comfortable distance. And that voice: operatic in its ambition, unexpectedly powerful, a baritone with genuine range wrapped around lyrics that are as transgressive as anything in the American punk canon. The Misfits worked in a register of deliberate shock, but what made them stick where other shock-merchants didn't is that Danzig could actually sing, and the melodies he constructed are genuinely haunting. This song is short even by punk standards — a burst of ugliness and beauty compressed into barely two minutes that somehow contains more emotional information than its length suggests. It belongs to the late-Seventies/early-Eighties horror-punk scene that the Misfits essentially invented and no one has since replicated authentically. You'd reach for this in the particular mood that wants to feel the edge between repulsion and delight, the Halloween-season state of mind that enjoys a controlled brush with darkness. It's camp and it isn't, simultaneously. That ambiguity is the point.