Credit: Found On Internet

Having co-founded the horror-rock Misfits with bassist Jerry Only in 1977, Glenn Danzig quit in 1983 to take his new band Samhain in a more ominous, darkly romanticised direction. In 1987 they were signed to Rick Rubins’ label Def American (later American Recordings), and getting guitarist John Christ and ex-Black Flag drummer Chuck Biscuits to join him and Samhain bassist Eerie Von, he renamed the outfit and released the Rubin-produced album the following year.

Rubin’s clean and uncluttered production keeps Danzig’s lyrics of apocalyptic demons and “pounding out eternal pain” at the fore, with Christ’s incisive riffs backed by a bricks and mortar-solid rhythm section. Twist of Cain opens with a note-bending riff that Nirvana’s School would later echo, whilst Danzig wakes up from a dark slumber with increasingly fierce vocal grunts and yells. She Rides and Soul on Fire manage slow-tempo pulses, both with a sexy groove, whilst Am I Demon blazes with distorted guitar-stabs reminiscent of Deep Purple’s Highway Star.

Unlike label-mates Slayer, whose acerbic delivery was matched by graphic lyrics of death, war atrocities and hell, Glenn Danzig’s insinuations of gleeful iniquity take a more poetic style. His lyrics are subtle portraits of violence in a living hell, as in Am I Demon: “Hordes of faces, empty eyes, I see nothing new. Seasoned schemes of slimy curs, offer up their flu.”

This ‘Evil Elvis’ permeates the album like a sinister fog clinging to a B-movie graveyard. He’s brooding and seductive as he tears apart Christian imagery and replaces it with his nightmarish worldview, or, as on Mother, sings of pure enmity to an older generation too entrenched in false religions to begin to comprehend where he’s coming from – a metal The Times They Are a Changing, if you like.

As the ‘hit’ of the album (only becoming an MTV success 5 years after the album’s release), Mother starts with a lazy three-chord intro that soon explodes into a mess of sing-along catchiness and inspired guitar solos. Anyone who’s seen Beavis and Buthead’s reaction to the song should know what to do.

Evil Thing finishes the album with a guitar-led funk familiar to fans of Houses of the Holy-era Led Zepplin, leaving the listener in the middle of a riff - the final statement on a faultlessly assured album. Although the band would go through further acclaimed musical changes, Danzig remains their most successfully selling record and still deserves a place in anyone’s pile of classic albums.