Friday Full-Length: Type O Negative, Blood Melting Extremity
Just for reference, this isn’t actually the first time I’ve closed out a week with an unofficial release, aka a bootleg. I normally wouldn’t — obviously, or it’d’ve happened more often by now — but the category has only been called ‘Bootleg Theater’ for the last 13 years, so you can think of it as periodically living up to the premise if that helps. In any case, Type O Negative never actually put out an honest-to-goodness live album — you’ll recall 1992’s The Origin of the Feces was sub-titled ‘Not Live at Brighton Beach,’ and indeed, it wasn’t really live. If nothing else, I’d offer Blood Melting Extremity as a candidate or substitute for that.
Actually, if this show, recorded from the soundboard at the Gino in Stockholm, Sweden, on Oct. 2, 1994 (the set ends in the video above at 55:30; there’s a demo of “Summer Breeze/Set Me on Fire,” a track by Laibach and other stuff tacked on here but I went with what I could find), was to finally see a proper mixdown, master and release, it would only be earned. The sound quality is incredible enough to justify that — also the many, many subsequent incarnations the bootleg has received, including titles like Even Snow Dies and Bloody Stockholm, etc.; if you’re interested, I chose Blood Melting Extremity over those because it’s the CD of the show I first bought — and the performance, stage banter and setlist encapsulate everything that worked so well about the quintessential Brooklyn four-piece at that point in their history. Touring for their landmark 1993 third album, Bloody Kisses, the band were at an early pinnacle, embracing goth metal in their over-the-top Sabbath-meets-Beatles fashion with frontman Peter Steele, a prototype of the metal icon he’d become throughout the rest of the 1990s, leading the four-piece on bass with Kenny Hickey on guitar/vocals, Josh Silver on keys and Sal Abruscato (I think; he was also in Life of Agony at the time; if it wasn’t him it would’ve been Johnny Kelly of course) on drums.
I’ll gladly put the version of “Gravitational Constant: G = 6.67 x 10^-8 Cm^-3 Gm^-1 Sec^-2” on Blood Melting Extremity forward as one of the best things the band ever did. For that alone, this disc. But “Too Late: Frozen,” the Black Sabbath cover “Paranoid,” and especially “Christian Woman” shine here, tinted bright-but-muted green and the latter introduced in trademark deadpan by Steele as, “A song about a girl who loved god just a little bit too much,” ahead of “Bloody Kisses 
(A Death in the Family)” and “Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All),” the latter of which would’ve already been a hit for them by the time they got abroad on this tour. Given the audience also singing along to “Christian Woman” earlier, gloriously audible, that would’ve been true of that song as well. And closing out, played just a little bit faster than on the album, the keyboard line in “Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All)” is all the more clearly a send-up of goth culture, heavy metal, everything.
As the vocal warble in “Too Late: Frozen” demonstrates early, one of the things that distinguishes Blood Melting Extremity from various other Type O Negative bootlegs out there — and many other even soundboard bootlegs that I’ve encountered at various points; Black Sabbath‘s Asbury Park 1975 (discussed here) comes to mind as one of the few of its caliber — is that the quality of the recording allows both the nuance and the power in the band’s sound to shine through at this point. The chug of “Christian Woman” in the verse threatens to swallow Steele‘s voice, yet in the second half of the song when he slips into sexualized rhythmic breathing — gleefully homoerotic and goth-theatrical as ever — it comes through clearly, as do the chime sounds there, keys as their take on “Paranoid” slips into Seals and Crofts, and the surging instrumental melody along with the utterly doomed march of “Bloody Kisses (A Death in the Family)” as it moves toward its eighth minute before the declining mourning bell tones back the final push.
It’s not just a novelty release of a band playing songs; their dynamic is captured. I was fortunate enough to see Type O Negative multiple times prior to Steele‘s death in 2010, and Blood Melting Extremity is who they were on stage. I don’t know if you’d call them “hungry” — thirsty perhaps, in the parlance of our times — in the sense of cloyingly going for audience approval, but they make it not at all counterintuitive to think of a band playing slow as nonetheless being urgent. That is to say, they sound young, but also like the emergent masters of their sound that they were. The hook in “Black No. 1” alone is ready proof, waiting to be heard. And when Steele shouts the line, “it was like fucking the dead,” there’s melody there too, which along with the “I don’t know…” added to the first verse of “Christian Woman” speaks to the band’s open approach to their own material. They were confident, arrogant, enough to change it up at this point, and they’d continue to be throughout their career, but locked in as a group in terms of chemistry and each member of the band knowing where the other was headed. As far as shows go, this is superlative, and I mean that.
There are arguments to be made that Bloody Kisses was the peak of the band. I don’t think it was — and if you want to have a friendly debate on the point, golly, that sounds like a good time — but there’s no question this era was a special time for them and the beginning of an ascent that would go even further, commercially and aesthetically, on 1996’s October Rust (discussed here). They’d built on what they’d done across 1991’s Slow Deep and Hard and The Origin of the Feces, come into their own as performers and songwriters (Steele is largely credited with the latter, but I won’t downplay the contributions of the others in making Type O Negative who they were), and however dumb they may have called themselves, they were clearly intelligent and self-aware enough to know they had a good thing going.
But to bottom-line it for you, I could’ve closed out this week with Bloody Kisses (and I will close a week with it eventually). I’ve had it on my desktop for the better part of a month, just waiting for its turn. But I went with Blood Melting Extremity instead.
As always, I hope you enjoy. Thank you for reading.
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So, Quarterly Review, huh?
You should know that after writing that sentence I stopped for 25 minutes and tried desperately to get caught up on email. It didn’t work. I’m still at 182, down from 191 new. Most of that is Questionnaires from May, June, July, this week. I just suck at everything, but please understand I’m doing my best.
I had a (telehealth) appointment yesterday with a neurologist. Given my family history and the fact that I continue to feel like I’m from a different planet than, say, everybody else, I wanted to try to understand what’s going on with my brain. Am I on the spectrum? Apparently, probably not. But I do have ADHD and some kind of autonomic brain dysfunction, which was oddly reassuring to hear. I was offered ADHD meds but I was like, “No way lady, I’m in the middle of a Quarterly Review! I’ve got 50 records to write up next week and need all the hyper-focus I can get!”
But it was fascinating to be so nailed. The doctor ran through an array of symptoms/manifestations in my personality and, even more, physicality, that I’ve dealt with throughout my entire life, and for someone I’ve never actually met to have that much of a sense of at least that part of who I am, well, yeah. Read me like a book. She even went so far as to prescribe orthotics for my fucked up feet. She told me to go swimming more. So I guess I’m doing that this morning.
I need to have blood work done — blood tests are a running gag for me going back over half a decade to all the fertility treatments before The Pecan was born; she said it and I rolled my eyes because of course blood work — and have a neuropsychological evaluation to schedule for like two months from now. A big questionnaire to fill out that I’m sure will be daunting emotionally. I don’t know what I’m looking to find out other than maybe to give a name to why I seem to myself to operate and to feel so differently from other people — understand, this is not me calling myself “special” unless you mean “special” in the sense of “unable to function like everyone else” — and maybe give a little bit of context and future understanding to my son.
Because he’s the one who’s going to reap all my bullshit, and I know that precisely because I did the same. But my father never sought treatment of any kind, never even tried to take meds (I’m still testing waters being off Citalopram after about five years; it’s going as you might expect), just spent his whole life wanting to die and then eventually dying alone, not even cognizant it was happening at the time. I don’t want to be remembered like that. At least Joe — that’s his name — will be able to say I tried to understand what was happening and why I was the wreck I was when I’m gone. I’m trying.
Anyway, life takes you to interesting places.
More Quarterly Review next week, also a full stream and probably not as much of a review as I’d like to write for Sonic Flower on Thursday, and Abronia video premiere (already reviewed the album so that’ll be easier) on Tuesday and other odds and ends throughout the week as they come up.
I hope you have a great and safe weekend. We’re coming into Fall now, which is my favorite season, because it’s beautiful and you can wear flannel without getting overheated. I hope you enjoy it as well.
Thanks again for reading.
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Tags: Blood Melting Extremity, Brooklyn, New York City, Type O Negative, Type O Negative Blood Melting Extremity
