Type O Negative Entertainment Art "Dead Again" (SVP/Steamhammer) Released March 13, 2007

The cover sports a dark, green-tinted picture of Rasputin, the mad Russian mystic with lettering done in faux-Cyrillic font with every other letter inverted. Just looking at this thing gets you depressed. Which is great, but what about the music?

“Dead Again” provides the gothic rock you expect from Type O negative, flowing nicely into one song after another. It stays strong and darkly destructive in that grand Type O Negative way so long as you listen to the whole album together or just several songs in a row.

Perhaps in a live setting these songs work and flow better. However, as studio songs listening at home many of them are just too long. More than half of the songs run longer than seven minutes and “These Three Things” actually runs more than 14 minutes!

Obviously, some trimming and tightening up was needed. In several songs, the singing didn’t even start until a minute and a half to two minutes into them. Unless ready to listen to a whole lot of music in one setting, many of these songs come off as slow starting and get tiresome quickly.

“Halloween In Heaven,” one of the shortest songs on the album at four minutes and 20 seconds, serves as a great example of what the albums potential. With its compressed playing time, it’s far more energetic than the other song on the album and its lyrics like “The devil stole a yule tree decorated with souls” remains haunting.

Now don’t get me wrong, I still consider much of the middle portions of these songs strong material with powerful guitar riffs, pounding drums, soulfully deep vocals, and gothic melodies. There’s just too much of it for me to absorb. Type O Negative should have just picked the best of it and ran with that.

Also, there has been a lot of press about frontman Peter Steele rediscovering his Catholic roots and how this affected the album. In fact, the insert that came with the album even unfolds into the shape of a cross.

You find this Catholic emphasis best in the lyrics. “These Three Things” takes an obvious stance against abortion while other songs mention forgiveness, sins, souls, heaven, and hell. Disturbing, almost echoing tomes like you’d hear monks chant in a medieval church accompany many of these songs.

However, this kind of symbolism and sound is nothing new to goth metal. These very things help to create the eerie atmosphere that is Type O Negative.

No matter what inspired this material, it still remains richly disturbing and darkly complex that will please any metal head and Type O Negative fans around the world. The songs might be a bit long for my taste yet I still find myself rocking out.

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