We have always considered Type O Negative an excellent example to have access to the metal world. They are surely a good starting point if someone unskilled of the genre asks which kind of metal band could listen to satisfy his or her curiosity; even those who never listen to metal, Type O Negative is one of those bands which people could change their opinion of, because metal is usually described as noise, fuss, total chaos.

Back in 1995, we discovered Type O Negative almost by chance, because one day a guy fond of metal music, gave us an album of them as a present, telling us he didn’t like them at all; the album under consideration was “Bloody Kisses” of 1993 and what caught our attention was the cover, two beauties in lesbian attitude! «Wow…» that’s what we thought, «…who knows how could play an album with a cover like that!»
Our friend couldn’t give us a better present, in fact, as we played the CD we dropped in a totally special, completely new world; we didn’t ever listen to anything similar, starting from the drum rhythms till vocals.

Type O Negative was founded in Brooklyn, New York, about the end of the ‘80s, by the will of Peter Thomas Ratajczyk, better known as Peter Steele. In the beginning the band of four had hesitations regarding the name to give to the band itself (in fact, they changed three names in a short time), but as for the music, they had a clear direction to take from the start; actually we can define them as pioneers, the ones who created the gothic doom metal, since they managed to perform something unique, something never heard before.

Since their first album of 1991 entitled “Slow, Deep and Hard” (the title explains everything), the distinctive features of their sound have been recognised, they alternate between faster, aggressive, heavy rhythm and doom rhythm, far slower, so slow to sound nearly extreme in some cases; a distorted and “buzzing” guitar is superimposed a keyboard with melancholic and dark sounds, giving rise to a creative style, full of decadent but imperial atmosphere… typical adjectives of the gothic period, if we wanna say! The voice of Steele, unique in the music context, is led by everything we’ve just said; he has a full-bodied and very low voice, it’s penetrating and extremely expressive. This set of unusual but wisely dosed elements created Type O Negative as an unique, magic, heavenly, gloomy and very dark band.

In 1992 a second album has been released; a work quite bizarre, starting from the title “The Origin of the Feces” with the cover attached, a beautiful, hairy Steele’s asshole close-up… and again, the most unusual thing is that it seems a concert recording, a so called live album because of the audience attendance, but it’s not like that really… the audience was called in studio to create the illusion to be a live album and the weird thing is the audience hostility against the band; in fact, listening all along, you can hear squabbles and trash talk between them and Peter Steele… it’s been even reproduced an ironic evacuation from the location because of an alleged bomb and the singer is inviting everyone to keep calm. On October the 31st, 1991, “The Origin of the Feces” was recorded live therefore performed in one day only. The following year, on March the 8th, even the mixing phase was done in a record time, which means in only three hours… the result is not a good album, that is it’s not one which takes you for its beauty, but turns out to be unique precisely because of these strange and unusual choices, it’s drenched in a kind of black humor which has marked all the way of the Type O Negative; to give you an example of this humor, just think of the artists from everywhere in the world, they usually release “The Best of…” when they get to a point in their career. The Brooklyn’s four thought to call “The Least Worst of” as their hits compilation… Impressive!

Now, leaving back the first two experiences together with anatomical parts, Type O Negative would have been in Studio again, seriously this time, to create their masterpiece of all… “Bloody Kisses” the one we talked about before and the one we’ll share with you in the next blog.