Two albums had been released, and they had opened on such ridiculous tours as Slayer’s “South of Heaven” tour and Metallica’s “...And Justice For All” tour. They had gained some notoriety for the video for their first single “Mother”. And the sales of both albums had been good. Coming into the band’s third album with this success behind them no doubt gave them a greater affinity with what they wanted to achieve with the new album. From the reports at the time, Rubin had become ‘less interested’ in the band by this stage of its development and was becoming less hands on when it came to the production side of things, and thus Glenn ends up being credited as a co-producer for the album. Did this help the construction of the album, that the direction the band moved in here was helped by the fact that Danzig was more hands on than the historically more controlling Rubin? That’s not an answer I can answer, but I know that this is different again from those first two Danzig albums, and that the confidence to move in this direction seems to have been one the band had made of their own accord.
Danzig has always been a band beyond classifying into a genre, and fans from the assorted bands of their past sometimes have a difficult time reconciling those differences. In many ways I believe that “How the Gods Kill” is the culmination of all of those years, and creates a modern mature and electrifying album that retains the mystery and madness of the early years of the Misfits and Samhain while delving into songs where each of the four members showcase their best attributes in the best possible way.
It is interesting just what place the bluesy sound takes on parts of this album. That hard based blues beat in “Bodies” just works so well. I mean if the blues was played like this all the time I’d enjoy it a whole lot more. The same is true of “Heart of the Devil” which utilises the same sound, and indeed apparently blues legend Willie Dixon was going to guest on the track, but unfortunately died from heart failure before he could come in and lay down his part. Prior to this album being written and recorded the band had played an acoustic show on Halloween, where they played some originals but also some blues tracks by Willie Dixon and also Muddy Waters. There seems little doubt that this had an effect on the writing of songs for this album.
The mood and groove of this album is what sends tingles down the spine when listening though. I love those first two Danzig albums, don’t get me wrong, but there has always been something special about this one. The songs can stall into slow quiet pieces with clear guitar and quietly spoken vocals and then burst into something more powerful and heavy with the click of your fingers, and it doesn’t ever seem out of place. Take a song like the opening track “Godless”, that pounds out of the speakers at you from the start in the great tradition of heavy Danzig tracks, before coming to a stop in traffic, the song back to a crawl as Glenn comes in with his vocals. This momentum is retained for minutes, until the music winds up again for the next verse, and Johnny Christ’s solo takes over through to almost the track’s conclusion where it finds the traffic snarl again and pulls up for the finale. It’s a brilliant track, but it is a style that only Danzig could get away with. Brilliant. The title track “How the Gods Kill” has a similar concept, a very quiet contemplative beginning with Glenn’s vocal lines barely being heard, before busting into the heavy beat almost halfway through the track and the song speeds off again. There aren’t many artists who can design this type of track and actually make it work, and I mean really work. Danzig does, and it most definitely does here.
The remainder of the album is just as good, combining the mid-tempo range songs with those that gain in intensity throughout. “Anything” is probably still my favourite song here. The clear guitar and soft vocals to start the song, before exploding into the heart of the song. Glenn’s vocals here are at their peak. “Dirty Black Summer” sounds like a song that wants to be a single, perhaps the most simplified of the songs on this album, which doesn’t distract from it at all. Indeed it was retained in setlists well beyond the following tour. “Left Hand Black” ramps up the metal-ness, held together by Eerie’s terrific bassline and dominated by Johnny’s ripping riffs and Glenn’s hard core vocals. Just an awesome song as well. “Sistinas” allows Glenn to bring his Elvis styled vocals to the fore, indeed if it was outside of the album you could almost believe it was an Elvis cover... though of course most of Elvis’s songs were already cover songs. “Do You Wear the Mark” brings the hard core back after that interlude, an awesome hard riff running along throughout as Glenn hots those unique notes again. The album concludes with the second simplified song on the album, “When the Dying Calls”, another easy song to groove along to as the album plays itself out.
On a story I will likely bring to you again, I had this album on one side of a C90 cassette tape, with Megadeth’s “Countdown to Extinction”, which was released on the exact same day, on the other side, and I played this tape to death in the nursery my then fiancé and I owned in Kiama at the time. It went around and around for weeks and weeks, and I knew these albums as well as any that I owned at the time. I was also lucky enough to see Danzig live the following year at Selina’s on their Thrall-Demonsweat Tour, a gig that is still one of the most amazing I have ever seen, and getting to converse with Eerie Von before the gig started. Great memories of an interesting time of my life.
For 30 years, this album has been one of those that, when I’m scanning the CD shelves to find something to listen to, that I will often come across, and immediately grab it and put it on. It is one of those albums that I have an unbreakable love for, that I listened to so intensely when I first got it that it joined the ranks of the albums that immediately remind me of the time when it was released, with the flood of pictures of that time coming in every time I listen to it. Which is still often.
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