You’ll forgive, I hope. I know it hasn’t been that long since I closed out a week with Type O Negative, but it’s over a year, they’re an all-time band for me and I’m trying to connect to something and pull myself closer toward out of what I’ll generously call a persistent malaise as regards totality. Life is Killing Me is a surprisingly rousing record.

And not just in its trilogy let’s-be-Ramones-now metal-punkers “I Don’t Wanna Be Me,” “I Like Goils,” and “Angry Inch” cast across its sprawling, CD-era 15-song/74-minute runtime. By the time Type O Negative released this sixth album in 2003 — it would be their last for Roadrunner; their final LP was 2007’s Dead Again, on SPV — I thought they were done. When it first came out in September of my senior year of high school, I thought 1999’s World Coming Down (discussed here) was a huge letdown after 1996’s landmark October Rust (discussed here), and I guess I thought that between drugs, the shifting trends in metal of the day, and their own widely reputed misery, they probably wouldn’t do anything else.

Life is Killing Me was released 21 years ago. I was in college. The promo CD from Roadrunner came to me at WSOU — it came to everyone; Roadrunner was tight with the famed NJ-based college radio station; it made us feel important — and had an audio watermark I can still hear in my head over some of the songs because I listened to it so god damned much. “Type O Negative, Life is Killing Me. The new album, in stores this June” in a plainspoken woman’s voice. This was an anti-piracy measure that also just happened to, for many, ruin a given listening experience. There wasn’t a ton that was going to keep me away from hearing this record though, including that.

This was inarguably the most Beatles they ever were in their crucial Beatlesabbath pioneering goth metal/doom approach. Songs like “Todd’s Ship Gods (Above All Things),” “Nettie,” “(We Were) Electrocute,” closer “The Dream is Dead” and even the ladies-of-classic-television rundown in “How Could She?,” delivered with signature humor in Peter Steele‘s lyrics has a sense of nostalgia or looking back that, 20.5 years after its initial release, I find is a nostalgia I share for the tracks themselves. So be it. The sitar-and-tabla-inclusive “Less Than Zero.” The ahead-of-its-time healthcare commentary and playfully gloomy atmosphere of the title-track. Those songs tightened Type O Negative‘s songwriting approach to a degree that October Rust and World Coming Down could only hint toward, and took the loss of Steele‘s parents — specifically the subjects of “Todd’s Ship Gods  (Above All Things)” and “Nettie” — and found comfort in unpretentious pop hooks (sometimes also laughably pretentious) and affectingly sincere lyrics.

Bolstered by an emergent dynamic in their sound that found guitarist Kenny Hickey contributing more on vocals alongside Steele on his way to sharing more of the songwriting credits on Dead Again and the always stellar organ/keys and backing vocals from Josh Silver — of course the band was completed by drummer Johnny Kelly, but had a thing for drum machines in the studio until the last album — the emotionality of Life is Killing Me comes through mature and sincere even in its winking irony and willful mischief. And though one doesn’t always think of them as a catchy band, “…A Dish Best Served Coldly,” “I Don’t Wanna Be Me,” “Anesthesia” — fucking “Anesthesia”; there it is; the declaration “I don’t need love” before two songs before they cap with “Another lonely Valentine’s Day” in “The Dream is Dead” — as well as “(We Were) Electrocute” and “IYDKMIGHTKY (Gimme That),” among others, take on pop with a rare boldness for anything heavy.

Like a lot of what they did during their years together, which effectively ended with Steele‘s death in 2010, Life is Killing Me has aged better in sound than politically. “I Like Goils” comes off as a kind of weak troll in hindsight, even if it’s Steele laughing about being hit on by dudes after appearing in Playgirl that time, and their take on “Angry Inch” from the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch is only loving if you hear it with those ears. They courted controversy in a way that, now, is the provenance of genuine assholes, which perhaps the surviving former members of the band — Hickey and Kelly play together in EYE AM and Silvertomb, and Kelly has drummed for Danzig, plays in Patriarchs in Black, Quiet Riot, and A Pale Horse Named Death with prior Type O drummer Sal Abruscato, who adds vocals on “I Like Goils” here — would say he or they all were. Fair enough.

But I’ll tell you this. After listening to Life is Killing Me for over two decades now since it came out, I just this morning heard the organ “I Don’t Wanna Be Me” in a new way on my headphones than I’ve ever heard before. Just sounded a little different, but it’s still something to appreciate and something unexpected from a release with which I think I’m familiar. But that’s how it goes sometimes with an album. You live with it and you hear things differently because you’re different. No way I hear “Todd’s Ship Gods (Above All Things)” and “Life is Killing Me” and “The Dream is Dead” with the same ears I had when I was in my 20s, but as with the best of things, Life is Killing Me doesn’t evaporate the span of years but grows into something richer with them. An evolving relationship to the music. And if you’re nostalgic about an album, doesn’t that mean you’re still getting something from it?

So, if you want to call it an indulgence on my part to dig into this one again, fine. It’s what I needed this week and in my deepest, most honest self, I see value in connecting to the emotion as well as the craft, hooks, and so on. This was a formative band for me, and this was the record they did that taught me not to count bands out until they were actually done. I am better for it. And better for having dug in, so thank you.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

Dog slept in kid’s room again last night. It worked this time, which I think might mean that happens forever now. Only matters if she pees on the floor, chews the American Girl doll, or whathaveyou. Until then, it’s crisis-anticipation, which is surely the healthiest way to parent.

Hey, it’s worked for me for the last six years, except not really.

This week featured a couple profoundly shitty, overwhelming days. It was MLK on Monday, so no school. Then it snowed and Tuesday had off and Wednesday had a delay and by Wednesday I was just about ready for a cinderblock to the face. Yesterday after school was therapy, which as I understand it has led to just about no discussion of feelings, which The Pecan at age six will sort of acknowledge having but has no real vocabulary for expressing beyond getting mad — my fault — and which is winding down its corporate-appointed 10-session run having perhaps nearly built a rapport. Today The Patient Mrs. is going to Wherever The Hell for a school board training and she won’t be back until Sunday, which makes the weekend full-on on-duty. Then next week is another week.

There’s no break coming. Ever. That month, year, decade you feel like you need where you’re catatonic and you just sort of sit there and stare straight ahead until you have your Buddha moment isn’t coming. It’s never going to happen. It’s going to be a grind until it’s nothing. No meditation, not even the daily yoga challenge, is going to change it. In fact, they’re just more shit you’re obligated to in the day. More more more. How on earth can that be a solution when the problem is everything is too fucking much?

And that’s basically where I’m at. Everything is too much. Everything. I am overwhelmed all the time. It’s not just about music or oh I get so much email because I’m somebody blah blah. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about simple fucking tasks that humans do that I crumple before. Getting gas. Going to the grocery store. God damn. The Patient Mrs. and I took like 25 minutes to go to the hardware store yesterday and it felt like the ceiling was going to collapse on me. Safe spaces are hard to come by. Not-anxious quiet is hard to come by. And as always, the problem is in me, is me. I’ve wasted the better part of the last 30 years shoveling chemicals into my body looking for some kind of ‘answer’ to myself and I still get more out of listening to fucking Type O Negative than I’ve ever had from an antidepressant, anti-anxiety med, whatever, psilocybin notwithstanding.

I’m gonna leave it there. That says what I want to say about music, about the way a record, a band, just a song, can make your life better or more livable, or whatever it is. It can fill a space in you maybe you didn’t know was there.

Have a great and safe weekend. Watch your head, hydrate, stay warm or cool depending on where you live, and don’t forget to breathe. Back Monday.

FRM.

[So, about half an hour after I finished writing this, The Pecan took a spill off the side of the couch, not only landing on my computer, but overturning my full iced tea cup onto it as well. It is, of course, dead. While I try to recover data from it, I’ll be on Little Red, my tiny emergency backup Chromebook, but that’s something I wanted to mark as having happened because, well, it’ll probably be at least another week before the situation is resolved. Cheers.]

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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.

—

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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Let’s be clear: if I did this in the middle of July, I still wouldn’t need to justify it, but Halloween week, I need to justify it even less. And though I’ve done deep-dive shows before, gone in career order for YOB or Neurosis to look at the arc of their career, this isn’t anything so ambitious. In short, it’s a mixtape. A Type O Negative mixtape.

I’ve listened to this band since I was 10 years old, and their stuff still holds up 30 years later and more than a decade after the death of frontman Peter Steele. But you don’t need me to tell you that. It’s Halloween, so I’m playing Type O Negative on my show. That’s as simple as it gets. If you don’t like them, don’t listen. You’re wrong anyway. This time around it’s your loss.

Thanks if you do listen. I hope you enjoy.

The Obelisk Show airs 5PM Eastern today on the Gimme app or at: http://gimmemetal.com.

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The Obelisk Show – 10.29.21

The Obelisk Show on Gimme Metal airs every Friday 5PM Eastern, with replays Sunday at 7PM Eastern. Next new episode is Nov. 12 (subject to change). Thanks for listening if you do.

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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.

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 Kisses, October 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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Type O Negative, October Rust (1996)

I hereby claim this album in the name of doom. Do I have any right or authority to do that? Nope, but it’s out there now and there’s no going back.

It’s not such a stretch anyway. Type O Negative released October Rust on Roadrunner Records in 1996 as the follow-up to 1993’s Bloody Kisses, an album that at least in the New York market produced successful radio singles in songs like “Christian Woman” and “Black No. 1.” Seems unfathomable now, but a quarter-century ago, that kind of thing happened, and I remember it distinctly because I was a 12-year-old boy calling Q104.3 incessantly to request them. The station even let me on the air a couple times in recorded intros to the songs on their nightly top-five countdown or whatever it was. They said I sounded good. Pubescent-me was stoked in a way that still makes me smile.

I was in high school when October Rust came out and the album hit me as few have. It was a bridge between my Beatles fandom and the appreciation for heavy metal I couldn’t help but develop as the wake of grunge found my weirdo-dork-ass looking for something angrier to relate to. By the time October Rust was released as the Brooklyn band’s fourth overall full-length, they weren’t as aggro as they had been on, say, “Kill All the White People,” but songs like “Love You to Death,” the woefully catchy “Green Man” and “Red Water (Christmas Mourning)” were lush in a way that was enticing, their arrangements thoughtful, sweeping and commanding while still remaining heavy in tone and presence. The bass fuzz from Peter Steele at the start of “Be My Druidess” remains a swaggering showcase of unmatched tone: “Here it is, fools. Good luck trying to top it.” And if anyone has, I’m not sure who it would be. Where Bloody Kisses, 1992’s The Origin of the Feces and 1991’s Slow Deep and Hard were all pretty raw in their basic sound, October Rust didn’t shy away from being over-the-top in its production any more than it did in the sexual mischief of “My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend,” “Be My Druidess” and “Wolf Moon (Including Zoanthropic Paranoia),” etc. The album’s 15-track — three of which are gags; I always thought the phrasing in track two of “We’d like to thank you for picking up our latest recording of October Rust” was a little odd, as though there’d been some earlier recording of it — and 72-minute runtime is daunting but never monotonous, the songwriting of Steele and his ever-malleable low register vocals complemented by the guitar/voice work of Kenny Hickey, the drums of Johnny Kelly and the keyboard/backing vocals of Josh Silver, who remains the unsung hero of the band in songs like “Love You to Death,” “Red Water (Christmas Mourning),” “Die with Me,” on and on.

But as to what makes October Rust doom, the arguments are myriad and largely pointless. Yes, Type O Negative play slow. Yes, they tune low. Yes, they’re clearly influenced by Black Sabbath as well as the aforementioned Beatles — they covered “Paranoid” by the former and “Day Tripper” by the latter, daringly bringing their own take to both — and like a lot of releases that were outliers while still being considered under the general umbrella of “metal” at their time, October Rust is never overly aggressive. Closer “Haunted” stretches just past the 10-minute mark and is among the most atmospheric songs they ever composed, and though the earlier stretch in “Be My Druidess,” the dance-y single “My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend” and their cover of Neil Young‘s “Cinnamon Girl” are uptempo, the crux of the album, especially in the context of what was then happening in the band’s echelon of heavy music — certainly Kyuss were on a major label and Black Sabbath were about to reunite with Ozzy, but there was nobody really bringing goth theatricality and doom together in the way Type O did — remains more about composition than aggression. They were a standout. More than two decades on from this album’s release, they still are.

Does it matter? Not really. The language of subgenre didn’t really exist at the time in the way it does now — the internet, social media, blah blah — but the bottom line is any angle you take it from, October Rust plows through whatever critique you might want to apply.

Much of the focus on it remains on songs like “Love You to Death,” “Be My Druidess,” “My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend” and “Cinnamon Girl,” but for me, the greatest impact comes between the latter two in that list, with the three-song punch of “Die with Me,” “Burnt Flowers Fallen” and “In Praise of Bacchus,” each of which shows a character, emotionality and craft that’s simply in a league of its own. I still can’t enter a European airport without hearing Steele‘s verse, “Hey KLM, AT&T/The UK post-system/Do you still love me” play in the mental jukebox from “Die with Me,” and the hooks of “Burnt Flowers Fallen” were deceptively simple and surrounded by guitar and bass brimming with tonal vitality pushed forward by drums (or was it drum machine?) at a pace that filled the gap between the slower and faster material around it. And “In Praise of Bacchus?” It stands as one of the best songs Type O Negative ever wrote, and they wrote a few good ones along the way. That 21-minute stretch has come to define for me everything that works best about October Rust in melody and the poise of execution that makes the record so enduringly special. It was never just about the hits.

They come back on after “Haunted” to let Steele say with typical performed self-deprecation, “I hope it wasn’t too disappointing…” and while an afterthought, that little bookend with the untitled second track after the white noise goof of “Bad Ground” winds up tying October Rust together with a sense of completion that shows that as far into the wash as they go at the end of what’s essentially the album’s grand finale — if one suddenly cut off; cold endings abound — they never lose sight of their overall purpose. I don’t know if it would be right to call October Rust mature given the pervasive sense of multi-tiered chicanery at work, but it was a huge step forward in their approach and aesthetic even from where they’d been three years before and a rare instance in which a band took commercial viability not as a cue to water down their output to reach as many people as possible, but to expand their sonic palette and create something richer on the whole.

They would answer October Rust in 1998 with the After Dark video and 1999’s World Coming Down, which chronicled Steele‘s cocaine addiction in “White Slavery” at the outset and made a running theme of it from there on. 2003’s subsequent Life is Killing Me was a triumph, casting off the residuals of goth in favor of a well-claimed sound and songwriting process that was entirely their own, and 2007’s Dead Again offered an actually-mature Type O Negative in songs like “The Profit of Doom,” “September Sun” and “Tripping a Blind Man” while seeing Hickey come to the fore on vocals more often in complement to Steele with a riffier approach overall. Steele of course passed away April 14, 2010 — I was in a depot in the UK waiting to take a ferry to the Netherlands for my second Roadburn Festival when I heard; all flights were canceled owing to the volcano Eyjafjallajökull — and Hickey and Kelly (the latter of whom also joined Danzig) went on to form Seventh Void which eventually begat Silvertomb, who toured last month with fellow Brooklynite Roadrunner vets Life of Agony ahead of a presumed eventual album release.

Being as seasonal as it is, I felt the need to get this one in before October ends. Doom or not, it’s a record that feels like home to me. As always, I hope you enjoy.

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Yesterday was The Pecan’s first birthday. One year. He spent most of the day refusing to nap, but had a little bit of brownie before the bedtime ritual — we put toys/books away, change diaper, brush teeth, sing “C is for Cookie” and then say goodnight — and we sang to him like you do. The real parties were last weekend in New Jersey and this weekend in Connecticut, so it was kind of just a little thing on this end. We gave him a pillow shaped like a grilled cheese sandwich and a clacker out of a toy instrument pack we bought last weekend. He seemed to dig both and demolished the brownie, so there you go.

Thanks to any and everyone who has yet checked out The Obelisk Show on Gimme Radio. That’s been a lot of fun to put together thus far and I’m going to keep it going for as long as they let me.

And thanks to any and everyone who’s bought a shirt from Dropout Merch so far. I’ve been talking about getting another design or two together, so I’ll hope to have more news on that front soon.

Next week, there are premieres coming from Frozen Planet….1969, Craneium, Holy Grove and Empress as well as a review of the new album from Castle, but I might go hit a show this weekend, so that would bump the schedule of other stuff and you’ll pardon me if I don’t do full notes as a result of that. I got invited and sometimes it’s nice to go someplace when you’re invited.

I’ll leave it there since this post is already longer than I intended and it’s past 5AM. I pushed my alarm from 2:30 to 3AM all week and it did me much good. Going to keep that up for a while and see if I can get away with it and still make it through the day.

Okay. Thanks for reading and please have a great and safe weekend. Don’t forget to check out the forum and radio stream.

The Obelisk Forum

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A quick story if you’ll indulge me. One of the best t-shirts I’ve ever owned (and I’ve owned a few) was a Type O Negative shirt in the era of 1996’s October Rust. It was red and for the song “Wolf Moon” — image here; not my picture — and on the back in big block letters was “LET US PREY.” I was in high school at the time, and for years, that was just about the only thing I wore that wasn’t black. Gradually, the shirt was retired, and gradually, I dug into more underground fare, but as a misunderstood angry boy from New Jersey, I had a deep affinity for Type O Negative‘s blend of fuckall and gothic theatricality — I still have “Kill all the White People” stuck in my head not irregularly — and that has remained on more than a nostalgic level. Even up to 2007’s Dead Again, their final album, I counted myself a fan, and I remember where I was when I heard Peter Steele, who was always an entertaining interview, died in April 2010.

All of this means that when Philadelphia trio Heavy Temple take on October Rust opener “Love You to Death,” I come in predisposed in favor of it. Still, the three-piece whose to-be-released-sometime-this-year EP is eagerly anticipated have done well to make the song their own, playing off the established, deeply remembered original version while throwing in a sonic twist. I won’t spoil that, but it’s an impressive turn on expectation as well as a vocal showcase to which the band lives up encouragingly. I continue to look forward to that EP.

If you’re wondering, I still have that shirt as well. Some things you just don’t throw out.

Some words from the band, and of course, the audio:

High Priestess Nighthawk (bass/vocals) on “Love You to Death”:

It started as a Valentine’s gift for Will Mellor from Hivelords. I’d never really sunk my teeth into Type O til I met him. He also did the final mix. But then i figured why not share it with everyone? It’s one of their best songs. I considered putting it as a secret track on the forthcoming EP (release TBA), but figure Valentines day was as good a time as any to release it. I recorded pretty much everything in one day, But the song is well written so it wasn’t hard.

https://www.facebook.com/HeavyTemple/
https://www.instagram.com/heavytemple/
http://heavytemple.bandcamp.com/

Heavy Temple, “Love You to Death” (Type O Negative cover)