(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summary.
Type O Negative achieved perhaps the most shocking fusion of metal, industrial and gothic languages. With vocalist Peter "Steele" Ratajczyk convincingly impersonating a psychopath who uttered nihilist, racist, sexist, fascist invectives, keyboardist Josh Silver molding grandiose sonic architectures, and guitarist Kenny Hickey highlighting the turpitude of the stories with excoriating noises, the terrifying vision of Slow Deep And Hard (1991) acquired a metaphysical dimension besides and beyond its hyper-realistic overtones, bridging the philosophical themes of sex and death the way a black mass would do. Moral ambiguity translated into musical ambiguity, as anthemic choruses wavered like funereal dirges, epic riffs shrieked like agonizing spasms in the struggle for survival, and homicidal fantasies peaked with evil apotheosis. Contrasts and juxtapositions blurred the difference between hell and paradise. Each song was structured as a sequence of movements, each movement arranged in a different fashion, and the sequence leading to unrelenting suspense. They sounded like Wagnerian mini-symphonies composed in Dante's Inferno and supercharged with fear and despair. The apocalypse subsided on Bloody Kisses (1993), a more sincere fresco of urban violence.
Full biography.
(Translated from my original Italian text by Troy Sherman)
Type O Negative were one of the greatest beacons of rock
music of the 1990s, their borders stretching from heavy metal, to industrial, to
gothic music. In their little hellish complex, they carved some of the most
tragic and hallucinatory pages in the history of rock music. The utter cruelty
and nihilism of their songs have few equals. Type O Negative were prophets of
the moral vacuum, for which for which paradise is simply and sadly the
equivalent of Auschwitz, but without the inscription of “Arbeit Macht Frei.”
Peter Steele (born Peter Ratajczyk) had already garnered
infamy in New York in the mid-80s, when he sang in a thrash-metal band called
Carnivore. The tracks on the album Carnivore
(Roadrunner, 1986) are a dazzling wall of post-apocalyptic society, a sort
of “alien” music. After another album, Retaliation
(Roadrunner, 1986), with new guitarist Marc Piovanetti, the group disbanded.
Steele, a suicidal ex-cop, then formed Type O Negative
with Kenny Hickey on guitar and Sal Abruscato on drums. The singer himself was
on bass, and one of the most creative bassists of heavy metal. Steele was already famous for is racist, fascist, and sexist lyrics,
but the band had their rapid success with the contributions of the fourth
member, Josh Silver, whose cunning work on keyboards added much of the
melodrama of the music.
The album Slow Deep
and Hard (Roadrunner, 1991), an autobiographical concept album which is sometimes self-parodying, is one of the masterpieces of heavy metal.
It is a terrifying, and sometimes funeral, glimpse
into frightening urban neurosis. Their blend of death metal, hardcore and
industrial music is in fact a museum of the underlying pathologies of criminal
perversions latent in every frustrated brain. The bestial shouts (much more
than “songs”) of Steele, trapped within the chaos of the riotous sounds, takes
on an epic significance in the epic struggle for survival (moral and material)
made by each of those distorted brains every day.
The disc is divided into six long compositions, each of
which in turn consists of different movements. Unsuccessfully Coping With The Natural Beauty Of Infidelity
includes a brief introduction of speedmetal (Anorganic Transmutogenesis), which then melts suddenly into an
atmosphere of almost paradise: Coitus
Interruptus, which is simply sung by a man and a woman having an orgasm.
The accompaniment has an appropriate feeling of apotheosis, in particular with
the acoustic guitar and electronics, which are set to a triumphant tone. The
final movement is I Know You're Fucking
Someone Else, which, if it were sung in a human register (instead of being
shouted in a bestially), might have been something of a synth-pop hit. It
contains the same melody, but has an arrangement on par with the rave-ups of
the 1960s, complete with a choir, organ riffs, and guitar solos, all growing
more and more hysterical as the song progresses.
The overture of Der
Untermensch is an instrumental piece. It is simply an unpleasant and
rumbling accumulation of electronic sounds that leads into the hardcore first
movement, Socioparasite, one of their
typical Nazi speeches. It falls into another instrumental nightmare, which
builds into the second movement, Waste of
Life. This movement is the fresco of a social outcast, the fact that is
immediately apparent with the dissolution of cadences. It is highlighted by a
synth melody line, and tries to frame the squalor of those desperate lives from
the perspective of the desperate human condition. It closes on industrial
cadences in a leaden climate. There is no compassion, only the contemplation of
human misery.
These mini-symphonies are full of fear, and do not hesitate
to confront the most vile and gruesome of society’s issues. In the midst of Xero Tolerance, Steele recites "and
now you die": the music describes murder from the point of view of the
sick mind of a psychopath seeking revenge. It describes his brutal joy in
seeing the victim killed before his eyes. Immediately after, the song launches into a tribal
pow-wow at supersonic speeds. In a blaze of macabre and murderous impulses,
Steele relays to the listener how he had meticulously prepared the crime.
Prelude to Agony
opens with martial sentences that create an adequate beginning to a
suspenseful, thrilling story. As the track unfolds, it is shows itself to be
the report of a sexual assault from the point of view of the attacker.
Eventually, it turns into a ceremony of self-worship of the act of rape.
Steele, who enjoys the screams of the victim, moans his story while the violent
music jackhammers away over a funeral chorus of monks (with bells and wind in
the background), which gives the event a dementedly sacred value. The sound staging
is so effective that the song, an orgy of misogyny and sharp sexual instincts,
becomes a genuinely uncomfortable ordeal, almost like a detailed documentary of
the terrible scene.
Again,
the choir of monks (this time accompanied by the walking chains of the damned)
leads the instrumental Glass Walls of
Limbo, perhaps the most dismal song in the history of rock music. It crowns
their search for a barbaric, climactic technique.
Gravitational Constant
is a wild Sabbath. It slowly changes into a requiem for the protagonist, of
course (at this point) condemned to suicide: "Suicide is
self-expression".
The sounds on this album are always dense and tragic, and
give no hope of truce. This record is pervaded by a post-industrial
"Wagnerism" akin to Foetus,
and follows the ultrapunk rhetoric, yet is always derailed by an explosion of
uncontrolled psychiatric imbalances.
Slow, Deep and Hard makes a sonic
trip into Dante's deepest sub-levels: into the hell of the alienated mind, into
the hell of the post-industrial society, and into the hell of the human
condition. The singer or the listener does not emerge from any of the three,
and instead finds an uncomfortable home in all three. The music is a proclamation
of hell and heaven, of holy sacraments and unholy crimes.
The high-sounding titles of the songs (which generally have
nothing to do with the themes of the text and instead refer to scientific
phenomena and fiction) add an additional unknown and critical exegesis to the
work, similar to psychiatric therapy. Perhaps the liturgy created by Steele is
a perverse form of a Grand Guignol mocking the "Rocky Horror." It implies first and
foremost a search for a deity. Even Freud would have lost his way in this maze
of aberrations and turpitude.
The quintessence of the hatred that reigns supreme in the
most deprived areas of the metropolis, the rock of Type O Negative feeds the
nightmares of people swarming among the outcast people and ruins of
post-nuclear cities. It absorbs and reflects their monstrosities, the
monstrosities of their murderous fantasies, their paradoxical existence, which,
in spite of an Apocalypse, is in spite of themselves.
Bloody Kisses
(Roadrunner, 1993) began marking a retreat to the sounds of progressive hard
rock, and away from the manic climates and madly murders of the first album.
The blasphemous Christian Woman and Black No 1 (the two hit singles) indulge
in the usual iconographic satanic porn marked by a melodic collage. The structure of the songs is
again in different “movements,” each with a different style of arrangement
(heavy metal, noise, industrial, and so on), and as always is has a dramatic
effect. Perhaps, though, it is not exploited to the fullest.
The disc also delivers a political manifesto in We Hate Everyone, in which the
group swears eternal hatred to all ideologies ("we hate everyone/ we do
not care what you think"). The title track exposes a long delirium of
distinctive death between organs and bells and the usual “Wagnerian” effects.
It is, however, another glimpse into the urban violence of a gang of perverted
psychopaths, and this time is is truly desperate. A note of helplessness and
failure, in the psychedelic raga of Can’t
Lose You, closes the disc. Compared with the previous work, Bloody Kisses seems to be in slow
motion, as if to enjoy fully the macabre quality of each arrangement.
October Rust
(Roadrunner, 1996) greatly reduces the violence of their music. Not only is the
sound reduced to the levels of a mild hard-rock (Green Man) or a sentimental dark punk reminiscent of the Cure (Love You to Death), but all of the arrangements, and the singing of Steele, find
a more adult and serious measure, sometimes ambient and sometimes even folk.
The atmosphere on this record is much less gloomy than in previous works. It
lies at the intersection of the synth-pop melodrama and Sisters Of Mercy. It invented something of a new style of
music, like in Be My Druidess and
especially My Girlfriend's Girlfriend,
the most catchy songs in the collection. The gruelingly evil progression of Burnt Flowers Fallen and In Praise of Bacchus are bloodletting
jams in line with the psychedelic Stone Roses. They are rich in timbre and
fascinating sound events, but they lack any real content and dramatic
development, and instead have an effect that is more hypnotic than terrifying.
The most similar moments to the epic and apocalyptic nightmares of their past
are the harmonies of Red Water and Wolf Moon, which is a half-way point
between the gospel of the last symphonic Pink Floyd
and the gothic classics of Lycia.
Some songs simply lack good ideas and almost all are extended without reason.
The experiences allow the electronics of Josh Silver and the guitar of Kenney
Hickey to fill the gaps of inspiration in the ten minute Haunted, which is a collage of the used-up tricks of the trade.
(Original text by Piero Scaruffi)
After the obvious flirt with melodic hard-rock of the previous album,
World Coming Down (Roadrunner, 1999) returns to the
epic-anarchic feeling of the first album with
White Slavery and Everything Dies, albeit with mixed results.
The latter's electrifying opening (Hendrix-ian glissando, paroxysmal growling)
is a little wasted given the subdued whining that follows.
On the former, Steele barks to the moon over super-heavy Black Sabbath-ian
riffs and sinister liturgic organ, although the old TON's format of the
horror suite is dangerously approaching the classic format of the power-ballad.
The stately Who Will Save The Sane is perhaps the most obvious
concession to the stereotypes of grunge, despite relentless drumming and
vocal distortions that recall early Grateful Dead.
Creepy Green Light (catchy organ refrain and lilting guitar progressions)
and Pyretta Blaze (the TON going Brit-pop?) are a little too "light"
for their past standards.
No matter how emphatic and catastrophic, this is also a very personal album,
and to some extent even autobiographic, displaying sincere pain and fear
after so many years of posturing. However, the melodrama is tempered by
an impenitent, devilish attitude, as when in
Everyone I Love Is Dead Steele turns upside down Joan Jett's old
adage: "I love myself for hating you".
This "maudit" approach to their favorite themes of death, drugs and lust
culminates in the closing, blasphemous prayer of All Hallows Eve.
Sonically speaking, this translates into complex but not violent structures,
into dynamics that support psychological introspection.
The 11-minute World Coming Down is first-order prog-metal, easy on
the rhythm and the vocals (in a sense, "anti-metal"), but replete with
tempo shifts, surging melodies, chanting monks and heavy droning riffs.
Its narrative (or, better, confession) is laid down in a bed of thick
elegant sound. The fractures that are typical of heavy-metal are smoothed
out in a manner not too different from shoegazers' trance.
Flawlessly produced and sequenced
(short instrumental interludes take advantage of modern recording techniques
to disorient the listener between one song and the other),
the album promises more than it delivers.
Life Is Killing Me (Roadrunner, 2003) stands like a summary of the
diverse styles experimented throughout their career.
It has the same power of their early years, but less genius.
It has the catchy and furious I Don't Wanna Be, the usual dose of
anger and angst (Life Is Killing Me, Anesthesia,,
Less Than Zero), the ballad The Dream Is Dead, the
dark-punk vehemence of I Like Goils, the
anthemic If You Don't Kill Me I'm Going To Have To Kill You,
the instrumental Thir13teen. They all boast impeccable performances.
But the band does not deviate a bit from the beaten territory.
Dead Again (2007) contains the eleven-minute The Profit of Doom,
the melancholy September Sun and the convoluted suite These Three Things.
Peter Steele died in april 2010.
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