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Friday Full-Length: Type O Negative, World Coming Down

It had been probably a decade since I put on World Coming Down, the fifth album from Brooklyn, New York’s Type O Negative, but I still knew every word to every song. That’s a special record.

Type O Negative — principal songwriter Peter Steele on bass/vocals, Johnny Kelly on drums, Kenny Hickey on guitar/some vocals and Josh Silver on those oh-so-essential keys — were coming off an absolute masterpiece in their prior offering, 1996’s October Rust (review here), which saw them transcend the goth metal stereotype to which they’d been lumped in part rightly and truly bask in the possibilities for what they might offer in their impossibly-individualized blend of Black Sabbath and The Beatles. In a time when metal was beating its chest to the Panteras of the universe, Type O Negative was apologetically sexually transgressive, and they defined their own course and their own career on October Rust.

Yeah, all well and good, but then you have to make another record, right? Throw that pressure, Steele‘s well-under-way cocaine addiction, various personal losses and traumas, and the result is probably the darkest work Type O Negative ever released. Sure, songs like “Who Will Save the Sane?” and “Creepy Green Light” and “All Hallows Eve” seemed to speak to some of the same post-goth elements as October Rust, but when you put those alongside “Everyone I Love is Dead,” “Everything Dies” — who the hell let both of those on the same record? — and the slog of an opening that the album gets with “White Slavery,” and the affect is just miserable from the outset. Type O Negative had certainly trafficked in downerism to this point, but World Coming Down — even its 11-minute title-track, which is high among the best songs this band ever produced — felt more real, more personal, and at times the weight it seemed to put on the listener could be a lot to take.

A product of its era, it runs 13 songs and 74 minutes long with a Beatles medley at its conclusion after “All Hallows Eve” and “Pyretta Blaze” — which one might accuse of being a cynical redux/answer to the likes of “My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend” or even “Be My Druidess” from the prior album — and is peppered with death in the three interludes “Sinus,” “Liver” and “Lung,” which of course allude to cocaine, drinking and smoking. If this was the band’s excesses catching up with them, then fair enough, but the difference on World Coming Down is that what was gallows humor is instead just misery. If that seems like a fine line, Type O Negative demonstrate clearly by the end of “White Slavery” that it isn’t. Of course, Steele was still a songwriter at heart, so the clever chorus, “Let me say, Pepsi Generation/A few lines of misinformation/Watch your money flow away oh so quick/To kill yourself properly coke is it,” is just that — clever. And catchy. But the underlying message isn’t lost just for being couched in an accessible package, and, even the uptempo piano lines of “Everything Dies” can’t mask the plainness with which Steele delivers, “Now I hate myself, wish I’d die.” This, right before the flatlining of “Lung.” A radio hit about hair dye, it ain’t.

type o negative world coming down

There was no question that World Coming Down was informed by both the creative and the audience success of October Rust. From “Skip It” at the outset pulling a prank on the listeners to the lushness of melody in “Everything Dies” and “Pyretta Blaze.” The pre-medley closer “All Hallows Eve” seems to echo the sparseness (at least initially) of “Haunted” from the album before it as well. Each Type O Negative record was its own beast, from 1991’s Slow, Deep and Hard to 2007’s Dead Again, but neither were they ever shy about self-awareness, and that manifest throughout World Coming Down as much as anywhere. Even with the title-track as the centerpiece, it’s not a record I’d reach for before, say, 1993’s Bloody KissesOctober Rust, or maybe even Dead Again or 1992’s still-formative The Origin of the Feces, famous as much for its cover art as for any of the songs it actually contained. That’s not to say World Coming Down doesn’t have an appeal, just that, again, it can be a lot to take in. It is an album of meta-heaviness. They sound no less weighted down than the guitar or bass tones.

When Type O Negative were at their most ‘goth,’ on Bloody Kisses, they were tongue-in-cheek about it. There are some moves made to have the same perspective on World Coming Down, but somehow the humor is undone by the surrounding sincerity. As Steele intones during a break in the the title-track, “It’s better to burn quickly and bright/Then slowly and dull without a fight,” paraphrasing Neil Young in the process, it’s hard to know whether he’s working to convince himself or the listener of what he’s saying. World Coming Down is a gorgeous record, make no mistake, but its beauty has the arduous task of finding expression through a range of pains that comprise the recurring themes: death, addiction, inability to cope, etc.

The Beatles medley, with pieces of “Day Tripper,” “If I Needed Someone” and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” is fair enough ground for Type O Negative to tread, having made no bones throughout their career of being influenced by — or as they might put it, “ripping off” — that group at various points. They also did a number of Beatles songs live, including “Back in the USSR.” And their penchant for matching parts of different songs together could easily be seen as an extension of the individualized takes they brought to “Hey Pete” or their version of “Paranoid” earlier in their career. It’s a little out of place on the album, tacked onto the end, but if I’m not mistaken, Roadrunner Records had a mandate at one point that everything they put out had to have a cover on it. Fear Factory did “Cars.” Type O Negative did “Day Tripper.” Fair enough.

Thinking about Nine Inch Nails‘ The Fragile (discussed here) last week — which came out the same day as World Coming Down; Sept. 21, 1999 — prompted a revisit here, and while the context of Steele‘s death in 2010 adds a spin of tragedy to everything Type O Negative did, as someone who was a fan of the band at the probably-too-tender age of 11, and who called Q104.3 so many times to request “Black No. 1” that they knew my name, I’m glad for any excuse to listen to them when an excuse to do so happens along.

We’re in Connecticut, came up yesterday. I’ve got to wrap this up in like 10 minutes so we can hit the road. Dropping off The Patient Mrs. and The Pecan at her mother’s, then driving north into Rhode Island about an hour and a half to buy chicken from a farm up there, then back down to grab them and back down again to NJ, hopefully all by naptime, but we’ll see. It’ll be a busy day.

Next week — Quarterly Review. I’m supposed to watch the Candlemass live stream this afternoon and review that too. It starts at 2PM. That should be up Monday, but other than that, it’s QR all the way. Not much news lately, so it’s a good time for it. Of course I say that and next week will probably be flooded. Whatever.

But since I haven’t even managed to brush my teeth yet — already changed a poopy diaper, made the kid breakfast (admittedly half-assed), and got two posts up! — and there’s still packing to do, I’m gonna call it. The Gimme show is a repeat this week, but if you feel like listening, it’s always appreciated.

It’s 4th of July weekend. I don’t have much to say about it, but if you’re proud to be an American in 2020, you’re either fooling yourself or an asshole. We should hang our heads and mourn the unnecessary dead this year. Have fun at the fireworks.

Whatever you do with it, a day off is a day off. I hope you have a great and safe weekend. Enjoy yourself from a safe distance.

FRM.

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