Even if you get rid of all the art, stage effects, gogo dancers, and horror film clips that come with Zombie’s image and live show, his tunes are primal, kinetic death marches that merge nu-metal’s percussive riffs, industrial’s pneumatic stomp, garage rock’s outlaw sneer and goth’s spooky decay into a beast that is louder than loud and bigger than big. Zombie’s music is perfectly inundated with monsters, witchcraft, exploitation cinema, and the jumbled, horny instincts of those that love these things, that it comes out the other side of superficial as purely earnest. He’s the Metallica of people who love the fuckin’ Wolfman, honest in its psychological immersion in fantasy.
As a kid obsessed with monsters, that hit me hard. So much of my life before discovering Hellbilly Deluxe was spent being told I needed to experience real art – real movies, real books, real music, about real things like love and sex and angst and the quiet things that no one ever blah blah blah. What nobody understood was that I was experiencing with those things, just through monsters. Dracula was sexy, Frankenstein never asked to be born, and the Creature From The Black Lagoon was punished for being ugly. The zombie apocalypse was my life, and every teacher was a psycho in a mask who had it out for me.