Type O Negative were perhaps the paradigmatic purveyors, and maybe even the originators, of gothic metal music and, technically, they were only the fourth band I ever got into, at the tender age of 14. So they have a special place in my heart, though I was never completely sold on their brand of plodding, doom-laden, expansive gothic metal. I distinctly remember, in my penultimate year of secondary school, and after a deep, dark winter of listening to nothing but the inhuman, nihilistic rage of Messrs Reznor and Manson, that spring finally sprang, my friends and I started to take an interest in girls, and thus we began to search for alternative music with gentler, more human tones than Downward Spiral or Antichrist Superstar. We soon alighted on bands such as the Smashing Pumpkins, Placebo, Radiohead, and in my case, Type O Negative. October Rust gave me exactly the kind of lovey-dovey, but black nail varnish-wearing, ballads that I was looking for but, after the release of World Coming Down in September 1999, I lost interest in them a bit, and their 21st century albums passed me by. Pete Steele’s death in 2010 got my attention; it was obvious from his music that he wasn’t exactly the most upbeat guy in the world, but I thought that his wicked and world-weary sense of humour would save him. I never went back to explore what I’d missed, perhaps because of my declining interest in music. But now, at the ripe old age of 40, and with Halloween approaching, I couldn’t resist revisiting them, re-examining some of the material that left me cold when I was a teenager, and listening for the first time to Life is Killing Me (2003) and Dead Again (2007).
Slow, Deep, and Hard (1991)
All the essential and most intriguing ingredients of Type O Negative are present on their debut album – the doomy, distorted guitars; the spooky, Hammer Horror-esque church organs and chanting; the lyrics and vocal style which are, by turns, scary, sad, powerful, and then quite obviously sarcastic. But so, too, are some of the aspects I find less appealing about Type O Negative; the prog-rock-esque structure and length of the songs; the persistent recourse to thrash metal; and some rather eyebrow-raising lyrics, especially in the uncomfortable “Der Untermensch”. In essence, the album consists of five songs, each around ten minutes long, each split into distinct sections. Four of them detail Pete Steele’s anger / grief / disgust / homicidal rage over his girlfriend’s cheating, sometimes at the level of half-witted, gym-bro-esque slut-shaming, and sometimes in the form of ultraviolent schlock-horror ridiculousness (“Prelude to Agony”, for example, relates Pete’s desire to murder the lady in question by penetrating her with a jackhammer). Ultimately, the album is interesting as a kind of tongue-in-cheek, goth-metal opera about Pete’s breakups and attendant psychodramas, but the songs don’t remain in the memory for long.
* *
Standout track: “Unsuccessfully Coping with the Natural Beauty of Infidelity”
The Origin of the Faeces (1992)
This is a most peculiar release. Many sources list it as the band’s second official album, but it is, in fact, a live album, nominally recorded at Brighton Beach on Halloween night in 1991, and largely comprising material from Slow, Deep, and Hard. Strangest of all – it is not, in fact, a live album; it was recorded in the studio, and then dubbed with fake crowd effects and band-audience interactions. Presumably, it’s considered part of the band’s official discography because it includes several new songs which are emblematic of early Type O Negative’s evolving style, away from thrash and toward their characteristic goth-rock of ghostly keyboards and heavy, distorted, but melodic guitars. “Are You Afraid” is a two-minute appeal to man up and commit suicide, while “Hey Pete” is a partly amusing, partly unsettling doom metal interpretation of Billy Robert’s “Hey Joe”, wholly in keeping with Slow, Deep and Hard’s general leitmotif of Peter wanting to take bloody revenge on his cheating girlfriend. Overall, though, Origin of the Faeces is anything but essential, more a bonus disc to Slow, Deep, and Hard than a proper album.
*
Standout track: “Hey Pete”
Bloody Kisses (1993)
Bloody Kisses might be the quintessential Type O Negative album. Organ-inflected, gothic doom metal with occasional diversions into thrash; expansive, operatic songs split into discreet sections; despairing, angry, frequently tongue in cheek lyrics about duplicitous and demonic women – all the necessary ingredients are present to precisely the correct degrees. Moreover, this is surely Type O Negative’s most goth album. There’s something intrinsically medieval about it; the monkish chanting and choral singing, the continuous references to the Medieval Church and even, on “Too Late: Frozen”, full-on Viking chanting. The standout songs are among the band’s best work; “Christian Woman” balances menacing metal with a lush acoustic section to tell the story of a devout, but very horny, and thus highly conflicted member of the flock; “We Hate Everyone” is a tuneful rejoinder to persistent insinuations about the band’s rumoured political proclivities; and the closing songs “Blood and Fire” and “Can’t Lose You” are classic Type O Negative, wracked with the Madonna-and-the-whore, lapsed Catholic mummy issues that provided Pete Steele with so much of his song writing inspiration. “Black No. 1”is the standout track, an amusing, playful, but also heartfelt schlock-horror tribute to one of Pete’s gothic ex-girlfriends, complete with Adams Family-style finger snapping and haunted house sound effects. A couple of arduous doom metal marathons blight the album’s middle section, but the highlights are high indeed.
* * * *
Standout track: “Black No. 1”
October Rust (1996)
October Rust was apparently born out of a cynical desire to get more airplay and sell more records. Thrash metal and twelve-minute gothic operas were dispensed with, along with the discomfiting lyrics about eugenics or killing cheating girlfriends with jackhammers. The end product might best be described as a fusion of goth metal and dreamy, atmospheric rock, reminiscent of The Cure or My Bloody Valentine. Unfortunately, this experiment didn’t bring Type O Negative more commercial exposure – October Rust sold around half as many copies as Bloody Kisses. But it did result in their best album. The music is cohesive, consistent, rather beautiful, and above all, profoundly autumnal in its melancholy gracefulness. If Bloody Kisses invoked the spirit of Medieval Christianity, October Rust’s persistent lyrical references to druidesses, burnt flowers, werewolves, and a mysterious ‘green man’ of the forest resonate with pre-Christian, nature-worshipping paganism. It’s hard to pick out highlights but, if pressed, “Love you to Death” is a melodic gothic love song; “Green Man” is an exuberant, but fragile, tribute to autumn; while “In Praise of Bacchus” finds a drunken Peter lamenting the fact that “she hates me”, and culminates with a devastating, cataclysmic outro. The album is let down slightly by the short, silly interludes, by an out-of-place cover of Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl”, and perhaps also by “My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend”, an amusing and enjoyable crowd favourite, but somewhat disruptive of the album’s flow and mood.
* * * * *
Standout track: “Love You To Death”
World Coming Down (1999)
Maybe stung by the lack of response to the atmospheric rock of October Rust, Type O Negative reverted to full-on doom metal for World Coming Down. It’s their darkest record, largely eschewing both the elegant accessibility of October Rust and the playfulness of Bloody Kisses. The guitars sound like buzzsaws, loaded with fuzz and distortion; the drumming is slow and dour; the organs are straight out of a gothic funeral ceremony; while the songs themselves are positively bipolar, fluctuating between, on the one hand, quiet and creepy and, on the other, fast, furious, and loud. The cheery themes on offer include Pete Steele’s deteriorating drug addiction and depression (“White Slavery”, “World Coming Down”), grief and the fragility of mortality (“Everyone I Love is Dead”, “Everything Dies”), and two songs about using black magic to raise deceased romantic partners from the dead (“Creepy Green Light”, “All Hallows Eve”). The interludes, so frequently mere irritants on Type O Negative records, are genuinely harrowing, with each narrating death through various forms of addiction. It’s a heavy record, in every sense of the word, and the songs are a little too long and abrasive for my liking. Also unfortunate is that Type O Negative once again decided to include a titillating but incongruous cover version, a seven-minute Beatles medley which inexplicably and inexcusably closes the album.
* * *
Standout track: “Everything Dies”
Life Is Killing Me (2003)
Unexpectedly, the follow up to the almost unbearably heavy World Coming Down arguably represents a cleaner and catchier record than anything else in Type O Negative’s collection. Compared to its predecessors, the record comprises shorter, faster, more accessible hard-rock songs, eminently enhanced by shimmering keyboards, and with crystal-clear production. And yet, in some respects this album feels like a throwback to the band’s earliest LPs. Thrash metal makes an appearance for the first time since Bloody Kisses, though in a much smoother form, most notably on the tormented lead single “I Don’t Wanna Be Me”. Toxic relationships marked by betrayal and abandonment once again take centre stage (“A Dish Best Served Coldly”, “Anesthesia”), as do the now familiar themes of self-loathing, addiction, and loss (“Less Than Zero”, “IYDKMIGTHTKY”, “The Dream is Dead”). Notably, there are three songs here about Pete Steele’s deceased parents; “Todd’s Ship Kids” perhaps explains the origin point of his sometimes-toxic masculinity; “Nettie” is a catchy, touching, authentically and unconditionally loving tribute to his mother; and the title track is an intemperate, articulate tirade against the medical profession for both failing to save his father’s life, and then proceeding to bill him outrageously for this failure. Overall, a worthy addition to their collection, though it lacks the cohesion of the three albums that preceded it.
* * *
Standout track: “I Don’t Wanna Be Me”
Dead Again (2007)
By all accounts, including his own, Pete Steele went slightly mad in the years prior to the release of Dead Again. He experienced a cocaine-induced psychotic episode, began to consider himself ‘the son of god’, placed cameras around his apartment, and was ultimately jailed for beating a romantic rival half to death, after which he was confined to a psychiatric ward and underwent a religious conversion. All of this is relevant to understanding Dead Again. The songs present us with Type O Negative’s familiar combination of thrash and metal, and many of them are very long, but they frequently lack an intelligible musical structure, meandering somewhat incoherently from one section to the next. The lyrics are equally worrying. “Tripping a Blind Man”, “She Burned Me Down”, “Some Stupid Tomorrow”, and “Hail and Farewell to Britain” channel a positively paranoid sense of resentment and betrayal, perhaps directed by Pete at his sisters for their complicity in his internment. An uncomfortable religious fervour is also in evidence – on “The Profit of Doom”, an apocalyptic prophecy; on “These Three Things”, a fifteen-minute denunciation of abortion and call to convert Jews to Christianity; and on “An Ode To Locksmiths”, a biblical reading of Peter’s oedipal complex. Overall, Dead Again represents a bizarre and in some respects tragic sendoff, though it does offer a kind of closure in the form of “September Sun”, a sad, piano-driven ode to a lost love which provides the album’s sole moment of beauty and clarity.
* *
Standout track: “September Sun”
Ranking
1. October Rust
2. Bloody Kisses
3. World Coming Down
4. Life is Killing Me
5. Dead Again
6. Slow, Deep, and Hard
7. Origin of the Feces
Selected playlist
1. Christian Woman
2. Love You To Death
3. Black No. 1
4. Green Man
5. In Praise of Bachus
6. I Don’t Wanna Be Me
7. White Slavery
8. Everything Dies
9. Life is Killing Me
10. September Sun