Addicted To Noise Staff Writer Johnny Walker (Black) reports :
Recently, for instance, a colleague and I were hanging around a press conference for a recent Orb/Chemical Brothers show in Toronto and nearly literally bumped into the latter outfit's Thomas Owen. Snuffling anemically, the newly ascendant, gangly electro-god lurched past us, and after exchanging glances, my buddy and I both cracked up laughing: up close this supposed deity looked like a WASP version of Weird Harold, the kind of geek who spent a lot of time locked both inside his locker in high school and inside the bathroom with a box of kleenexat home. If the popular music scene of the late 1990s has been marked by anything, it is this triumph of the cool jerk, the elevation of the computer nerd to the status of god (I won't mention who the patron saint of this "movement" is, but his name rhymes with "dreck").
Anyway, when I want electronica, I'll listen to Trans-Europe Express and Tago Mago, thanks: no-one ever
has or likely ever will surpass the Krauts in that area. As for good old rock 'n' roll, I want some juice, some
blood, some sweat, not blippedy-bleeping sterility. And sorry, but at 6'2" and 215 pounds, I just can't relate
to some scrawny, squinting little guy up there with coke-bottle eye glasses and a headset, wanking off like
he was still alone in his bedroom with the newest video game. Small and/or scrawny is fine if you've got
Marc Bolan or David Bowie's style with which to make yourself seem bigger. But hey, who ever said
criticism of any kind was totally objective? They were lying.
Just as all looked hopeless, however, and I had sadly resigned myself to the current sad little prog-rock meets disco musical scenario, out of the blue came the perfect band for my bad case of pre-millennium blues: Type O Negative, led by a sardonic genius named Peter Steele, a physical giant (and former Playgirl model) with a brain to match who is creating some of the very best rock music by which to usher in the New Age.
Starting out in the early 90s in as a typical speed-metal outfit, Type O Negative began to evolve into their own unique musical style with 1993's artistic breakthrough Bloody Kisses, continuing their musical development with their latest, last year's equally impressive October Rust. Type O's music, which they (with a smile) label "gothadelica," is in reality a startling and stirring blend of eclectic musical elements drawn from 60's garage rock, 70s metal and 80s goth, all overlaid with a heavily melodic pop sensibility and recombined into a style which, far from being retro, is totally NOW, seasonedas it is by singer/bassist/lyricist Steele--a former heavy equipment operator for the City of New York--and his blackly humorous worldview.
On this evening--Friday, June 6--the band, headlining a quick stop-over from the current "Ozzfest" tour--headlined by former Black Sabbath leader Ozzy Osbourne, of course--drew heavily from their last two albums in an impressive show at Toronto's The Warehouse , marred only by the venue's notoriously shoddy acoustics, which at times even rendered Steele's droll between-song banter, a highlight in itself, nigh-indecipherable.
After a quick tour through the less-impressive thrashcore of their early days, a "let's get it over with" jam obviously included as a sop to old fans, the boys got down to the business of the present. Early highlights included the band's Howard Stern biopic soundtrack hit,' "Love Me To Death," a tour-de-force Type O melodramatic epic which typifies the band's "throw in everything plus the kitchen sink" approach, and their singular, gothadelicized covers of Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl" and The Door's "Light My Fire," which here sounded more like the latter band's bouncy "Hello, I Love You" ("With all due respect to the Doors and Mr. Morrison . . .we don't do it as well as them, but it's fun to play, you know?" quoth the typically acerbic Steele in his basso profundo growl at the song's end).
Throughout, it was the towering, massive Steele, with his Arnold Schwarzenegger build, waist length black
hair and booming, Andrew Eldritch meets Jim Morrison voice, who commanded the stage: it was difficult
to take your eyes off him for even a moment, such was his charisma, the bass guitar looking like a mere
child's toy in his hands (an image intensified when he ripped the strings from it one by one at the show's
end). Not that the rest of the band were slouches either: keyboardist Josh Silver seemed the embodiment
of 70s rocker Rod "Hold Your Head Up" Argent as he swung his impressive mane around with abandon.
What separates Type O Negative from the pack is, while you know that they know better, they don't use
irony or rockist satire as an excuse to evade emotion or pull back from giving their all: instead, they take it
all one step further, and in this sense are one of rock's first truly post-ironic bands. So when Steele sings
"Jesus Christ looks like me" in fan fave "Christian Woman," another highlight of the set, it is both funny
and still somehow oddly moving.
Type O Negative, then, like the Slovenian group Laibach (of whom Steele is a fan), rescue the "black sheep" elements of contemporary rock 'n' roll--goth, metal-- and make them relevant, even "hip, again. Unlike Laibach, however, whose impressive efforts nevertheless often exude the air of a laboratory experiment, Type O accomplishes the task at hand with what appears, at least, to be near-effortlessness. From the Question Mark and the Mysterians 60s garage-punk of the hilarious menage a trois tale "My Girlfriend's Girlfriend," which the band bludgeoned into submission on this night with help from their sound man, to the raucous metal-goth set closer, "Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All)," where Steele satirizes a former girlfriend enamored of the dark side of life ("She wants to go out cause it'srainin' and blowin' / But she won't go out 'cause her roots are showin' / Dye em black!"), Type O Negative good naturedly make fun of various rock 'n' roll conventions while simultaneously making rock 'n' roll fun again.
Sounds like the hippest band in the land, if you ask me.
