Review Summary: Going through the motions.
Being a horror punk group, Misfits have always thematically been in their natural element while touring during the month of October, so the band has made sure to include two recorded live performances from Devil’s Night and Halloween 2011 on only their third live album, and first since 1998,
Dead Alive!. Since there is no DVD counterpart to the album as of now, getting the visual experience of seeing the venue’s decorations and trio’s outfits during the performances is currently not an option, which is a shame, because being able to at least see these two shows might have made
Dead Alive! at least somewhat entertaining and exciting had a DVD option been made available.
Despite both shows being performed on the festive nights of special holidays, the set list here is anything but special. Being the first live album for the post-Glenn Danzig Misfits lineup, one would think the group would do something special for the occasion on any of the two shows, but both performances on
Dead Alive! are treated as just another gig. Due to legal battles,
Dead Alive! actually doesn’t feature any songs from the Danzig era of the Misfits, which was hands down when the group’s material was at its best.
Dead Alive! instead mostly features songs from their critical failure of a seventh album,
The Devil's Rain, and there’s little to no creative thought put into the arrangement of the songs played at the shows, as the song order of the first half of
Dead Alive! is nearly identical to the order they appear in on
The Devil’s Rain. It’s as if the band was just playing their set in accordance to the track listing on the back of the CD.
To top it all off, the manner in which these songs are played in makes them just as lackluster and underwhelming as they were on
The Devil’s Rain, which is disappointing, because if effort and imagination was put into this,
Dead Alive! had potential to be something redeeming for the current Misfits lineup in wake of the dwindling respect they receive from the once enormous Misfits fan base.
