Modern day druid dudes Type O Negative resurface with the latest phase in their commercial evolution, October Rust. Anybody smart enough to score TON's penultimate goth-broth, Bloody Kisses, knows what this follow through has to offer. Here, the Brooklyn Bible Bashers brandish a masterful merging of B-movie bellyaching and blood-sucking beauty. Pete Steele's baroque baritone bubbles babble about Bacchus and his girlfriends' girlfriend through torn tapestries of forlorn fantasia; though the man of steel's Edgar Allen Apocalypse mixture is the molten core of October Rust, Type O is a band; fuzzy fret work and cathedral keys swirl into a surreal seance of Wuthering heights as TON typifies a vein all their own. Most importantly, the quartet's third full length shares with it's predecessors a quality too often lacking in aucourant doom-class. The tongue-in-cheek tragedies of October Rust are a great way to ruin any day.
Hanging with the flow stones and the stalactites in a dank, dark cavern, I find guitarist Kenny Hickey,
resting before opening for the Blizzard of Oz. "Most of the time I feel like an invisible, blind mute
immersed in the middle of a crowd, just trying to yell and scream at other people as loudly as I can,"
he begins. "Many, many things piss me off about the world today: American consumer disease, the great
American sex scam, democracy that isn't democracy. Everything that pisses me off about human society.
I know most people are born to live their lives like idiots or cowards and then die. There's no doubt about
that." If he could legally kill three people? "Three wouldn't be enough; that's the problem. Probably
Ricki Lake would be in the top, followed by myself and the one I love most."
"I'd kill myself three times." We follow keyboardist Josh Silver's voice through the darkness to find him sitting under an oak in the woods. "Society stinks: always has, always will. I have no respect for human beings as species or animal. People are evil, torturous creatures full of greed and the only animal that mutilates itself. So we'll get what we deserve. I'm not trying to change, control, or do anything with the way society is; I accept it. My hobby is watching the human folly unfold.
"I don't like music. But, if I'm forced, I listen to older stuff: Beatles, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple. I'm pretty old, so like any dog I hate to change - once I piss on a tree that's my tree."
From Seals and Crofts to "Cinnamon Girl", Type O Negative remakes early '70s AOR ringers; only their versions resonate from a slow transistor deep in the Batcave where Bruce Wayne tunes the Batmobile. "'Cinnamon' seems to fit melodically and musically." Silver continues. "We always like a cover that people are not expecting TON to do. And the riff was easy to turn into something heavy."
"'Cinnamon' was one of the hardest songs for us to screw up," interjects Hickey as we step into the arena. "We're also doing 'Light my fire' tonight."
"I wanted to remake 'I think I love you' by the Partridge family as 'I think I hate you'," he continues.
"But, thematically, the lyrics to 'Cinnamon girl' seem to fit with October Rust. Every album we do has a sound,
a direction. And even though every single person has asked us along the way on every single release, we've
never really done a concept album. We never have a concept, but always go for an overall feeling. We also
don't want to do two albums that sound the same. We never want to repeat ourselves if we can avoid it.
When you go through a set of material you go for some continuity, but also some diversity as well."
Because of Steele's provenance with Carnivore's Darwinist profession and Slow Deep and Hards misconstrued lyrics, Type O's first tour of Germany met with cancellations, bomb threats and acid baths. Luckily, dust settles: "We toured Germany about two and a half years ago, and it was great." says Hickey. "We sold out every night- no fights, no arguments, no problems at all. But, Europe is very uncomfortable for touring. Definitely, the states is my favorite place to tour - the midwest to the west coast, northern 'cause it's not so hot and humid."
TON made clear from the beginning the name of the game is making enough money to disappear. "At this point I'll settle for just disappearing. Japan would be my first choice." Silver states. "But that would require about three years of language study to do correctly." Silver found the works of Ota Dokan through "reading too many Japanese death poems. He was a military strategist and poet in 15th century Japan." His words now grace the liner notes of October Rust.
"There's only one way to really disappear, but there has been some places I would like to live," Hickey mutters while tuning his guitar. "I've seen a good portion of the world, and, believe it or not, I would like to live in Florida for a more tropical environment. I'd also like to live in Amsterdam or Holland. I would live somewhere secluded, out of the dense environment Brooklyn always submersed me in. I've lived in Brooklyn for thirty years, too long for any many to stay in one place."
Onstage, spokesman Steele is a model of decorum, cordially countering the audience's chants of "You suck!" with "Yes, but you paid to get in." In the brief lapses between melancholic moshing, he monotones self-effacing stage patter like, "We're not good enough to do 'Black No. 1' so here's 'Black No. 2'."
When I ask Hickey how he passes the time, Steele Interrupts, "They're my prime motivation for working out - the rest of the guys in the band - because I look at them and say, 'Man, I don't want to become this sack of potatoes, with huge atrophied eyes from playing video games twenty hours a day.
"I don't play video games," retorts Hickey. "I do the usual thing. Gotta admit, I drink. But, I read mostly: lots of Bukowski and Miller. I have a diverse reading appetite." How did Hickey end up with the latter day Bela Lagosi? "I've known Peter for years. My brother was friends with Louie Vito, and I met Peter through Louie when I was sixteen. I've been playing around in bands since I was thirteen, but basically I was one of those everything guys: carpenter, roofer, plumber, gynecologist. Brooklyn's got a small musical circuit. There's a handful of studios in all of Brooklyn, so basically everybody knows each other."
"I ran a little private studio in Brooklyn to pay the bills," adds Silver, "Peter and I grew up together. We've known each other twenty-one years at this point. We've been in bands together since we were twelve." What bands, I wonder. "I wouldn't admit to anything. Anyway, ironically enough, Sal, who's no longer in the band called Peter when he was bored one day and asked him if he wanted to do a project. Peter's known me for so many years, and Sal knew Kenny: the usual neighborhood thing. We got together and sounded like crap so we set up shop."
Silver co-produces Type O with Steele. "Basically, like every relationship, it has moments where everybody's cooperative and dealing with each other," Silver explains, "and moments when everybody's fighting to get what they want. But, overall we do have the same vision so it comes together at some point and makes everyone less miserable. I don't wanna say were happy, 'cause that's a word that I don't use in my vocabulary.
"I've produced only a handful of bands in the last two years because of time restraints - I did the first Life of Agony album, Pist On and Sheer Terror. We love producing, but at this point TON is lousing up eighty percent of my life completely; the other twenty percent has got to be dedicated to survival."
October Rust brings Type O's first headliner tour; four gnashing ghouls with one gloomy goal of malevolent seduction. I lingered around them, under the benign sky, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumber for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
