Type O Negative: Bloody Kisses : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Type O Negative is an all-male Brooklyn, N.Y., gothic-metal quartet known for very loud live shows and very offensive lyrics. "Hey, don't think I don't know what you're doing, you stupid twat!" goes a line on their first album, Slow, Deep and Hard. The EP after that was called Origin of the Feces. Since both records featured the lyric "I know you're fucking someone else," it's safe to say that Type O Negative concerned itself for the most part with vulgar expressions of base emotion and bodily urges.

But listen to Bloody Kisses and you're not likely to believe your ears. The band's obsession now appears to be not fucking but nursing a broken heart. Just how radically they've changed their tune is evident in this lyric from "Blood and Fire": "I always thought we'd be together/And that our love could not be better."

So then, has love found Type O Negative? Have the tough guys who used to play a song called "Unsuccessfully Coping With the Natural Beauty of Infidelity" finally gotten their comeuppance? Have they traded metal edge for melancholy? A self-indulgent exercise in feeling sorry for oneself after being unexpectedly dumped, Bloody Kisses is easy listening for the lovelorn.

In between songs of religion ("Christian Woman"), death ("Too Late: Frozen") and benevolent vampirism ("Black No. 1 [Little Miss Scare-All]") are three solemn dirges, one of which – "Can't Lose You" – is, of all things, a hymn to the Beatles. The best song on Bloody Kisses, however, is vocalist Peter Steele's strangely scary cover of Seals and Crofts' "Summer Breeze," which turns a saccharine AM-radio nugget ("The jasmine's in bloom/July is dressed up and playing her tune") into a thing of evil beauty. So evil sounding is it that if the Prince of Darkness ever cut an album, this is undoubtedly how he would sound.

An odd glimmer of hope on this downer of a record, "Summer Breeze" is either a memory portrait of the one that got away or an ode to a new crush – or is that twat?