Misfits - Project 1950

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Music reviews of Project 1950

Music Review: Sometimes good people do bad things
Rating: 2 Stars

It's fine to release a cover album-- I happen to enjoy Metallica's and Guns n Roses's cover albums, as well as Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies; all the Gimme Gimmes play are covers, and they're great. I realize also that side projects are sometimes fun and entertaining, but listening to this album I'm fairly convinced that the main reason it exists is to make money from poor fools like me that perhaps like the Misfits too much. If not-- if indeed this is an honest attempt at a tribute to the songs covered on the album-- then it's a sad sad day, because that would mean that Jerry Only and Co. have lost any spark they once had for making music. For this album is one of the most uninspired, unenergetic, and even incoherent I've heard in a long time. It sounds like dollar signs and retirement.

Part of the fun of making a cover album is that you re-record songs that are already established hits-- so at the very least they contain some semblance of the goodness of the originals. But in this case the songs have been not only stripped down and made more simplistic than they already were to begin with-- the production is terrible and so what little music is still there sounds horribly muddy and sterile, even by punk standards. The vocals are singularly unengaging, which is a problem here because these simple songs are primarily vocally driven singalongs. I think that it's evident here why Jerry Only wasn't the lead singer for the Misfits on a recording ever before this one- he sounds like a tired, sullen drunk in a karaoke bar. I was particularly shocked at the version of Runaway on this record-- it's always seemed to me that the whole point of the song is the "wa-wa-wonder" part of the chorus, yet Project 1950 completely leaves that part out of the song! Come on, even Screeching Weasel got that right, and their version of the song was only 30 seconds long.

I could go on... like the moment on the DVD when some of the few people in the audience watching the Misfits play start throwing snowballs at the band in an arguably unaffectionate manner. My guess is that they were trying to get a snowball to land in Jerry Only's mouth so he'd have to stop singing. Of course, it's just a theory.

So take my word for it-- this is coming from a guy who likes the Misfits (old and new) a lot as well as all the songs they cover here-- you're better off buying a Manowar disc, because at least you can laugh at them. Project 1950 is grisly.

Description of Project 1950

"It started as a twisted dream...25 years ago in a small townin New Jersey called Lodi. It was there in April of 1977, at the dawn of the punk movement that the Misfits were born. Taking the title of Marilyn Monroe's last movie as their name in a move to immortalize her image - singer Glenn Danzig and bassist Jerry Only set out to make an impression. They wound up making history and creating a legacy that's power has not only stood the test of time, but transcended into an entirley new generation. Lienup changes followed and by early 1980, the band had coalesced around co-founders Glenn Danzig and Jerry Only along with guitarist Doyle Wolfgang Von Frankinstein (Jerry's youngest brother). Throughout the span of their career, the Misfits audience has developed into an army of "fiends" (the term for diehard Misfits fans) generating more interest today than ever before.