Type O Negative
Love You to Death

After three months since the first listen, I find myself here writing a review for the song that opened the door for me into the world of a band I consider one of the most interesting of the last thirty years, at least according to my tastes: Type O Negative.

Now I'll tell you how I encountered the Drab Four for the first time.

July 2020.
It’s a quiet post-lockdown summer evening when, locked in the house, I start my side gig as a webmaster - creating a new online store selling decorative knick-knacks.
A little bored, I decide to look for some 'unusual' music on a well-known music streaming platform.
Among the suggestions appears the "Dark & Gothic" playlist, I press Shuffle.
Having been into the good classic shoegaze slowcore of the '90s for a few days, I decide to go back down that path.

As the evening falls, slowly extinguishing the sunset, I am left alone and abandoned among the cold electric lights of my street and the darkness of my little basement, temporarily set up as a studio.

In the absence of much more ominous black crows, already fetishes and protagonists of classic tales of the grotesque and arabesque, some infernal magpies are loudly coupling on the cypress beside my house, in a whirling procession of eros and thanatos.

As master Poe teaches, in the world of the grotesque nothing is as it seems.
Perhaps the funereal cypress is actually the neighbor’s pine, and the two Eurasian corvids are just chuckling to annoy me while I try to complete the work on the site.
My mind, clouded by absinthe - or by some other spirit, at this point I no longer know what to believe! - is playing tricks on me.

I need to immerse myself in the darkness to find solace and a minimal dose of concentration, so I play some Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus, The Cure, and other prophets of contemporary spleen.

The slow, relentless pounding of the drum machines, baritone guitars, and basses, as in The Tell-Tale Heart, drags me further to the brink of despair: I feel the blood in my veins becoming thick, viscous, and black as the FTP upload of the images of bath ducks to the e-commerce site’s upload folder I’m making also seems to slow more and more.
In a few seconds, cosmic void clouds my senses, and I find myself alone, metaphysically transported to an unknown place.
I lose consciousness and fall sprawled on the ground, amidst a field of dead and decaying leaves.

A synthetic sound of violins awakens me, and the heavy burden of emptiness seems to dissolve at the first notes of a piano playing from a place beyond the darkness (whatever that means).
I am still here, in my little basement, the image upload is complete, and a song I’ve never heard before takes me by surprise.
“Wow! What’s with this change of style? - I wonder, opening the window of the well-known music streaming platform to check the name of the performer of the piece.

I had never listened to these Type O Negative before - or maybe I had only heard something from the first album after that famous film reviewer on YouTube talked about it, I only remember the brutality of that unlistenable stuff.

The booming voice of the singer starts grumbling something I can barely translate from what I’d call Dracula-like English:

In her house, a hundred candles burn / Salty sweat drips from her chest (...) / The beast inside me is about to take you...

Wow! Forget the crazy magpies on the neighbor’s pine: this is a blend of sex and death worth respecting! I’m hooked.

I look for a picture of the band: four guys with jet black long hair, dressed in black, among them a tall, muscular guy with a jaw like Dolph Lundgren (or like Crimson Chin, the superhero made famous by the series The Fairly OddParents).
Apparently, the band embodies the stereotype of dark metalheads in animated shows and comedies.

And indeed, the piece has a sudden metal twist, pretty predictable in the piece itself, but which I didn’t expect to hear in a mainly post-punk and gothic rock playlist.
The melody is halfway between somber and ethereal, the accompanying keyboards bring to mind a gothic atmosphere, but the harsh and acidic guitar sound is copied from Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath.
Listening carefully to the rhythmic section, I notice the bass is played and sometimes struck like a rhythm guitar, while the drums are compressed and very steady, but not cold like those synthesized from Darkwave - probably sampled and programmed, but still an authentic drum set played.

I beg to serve, your wish is my law / Close those eyes and let me love you to death

There’s something out of place in these verses: a man like Mr. Peter transforms from a frenzied butcher (see Slow Deep & Hard, the first album mentioned above) to a humble sexual slave, denying not only his own will but also his common sense - ...loving to death? You mean, biting the dust for a shag? Are you mad?
In short, the lyrics explore the psychological depths of sadomasochism.

From what I read on Wikipedia during the chorus, the track contributed to defining the frontman Peter Steele as a sex symbol in the eyes of many fans, female and male alike. This was already helped by his imposing and - at the time - muscular physique, his facial expression halfway between melancholy and calm, and, above all, a nude spread in Playgirl.

I’ve now abandoned the website to its own fate, who cares about the imminent delivery! And who cares about the gothic playlist... This track is another planet!
I have to discover more about this band, capable of transitioning from hardcore in the first album to the gothic and doom metal atmospheres of this track.
I tiptoe into the world of one of the most niche yet most beloved bands by metalheads and beyond, and so I return to the barbarian lands of metal after nearly fifteen years since my last forays into this music genre.

Am I good enough... for you?

whispers Steele, then repeats the line with a bursting, suffering cry, and here lies the real strength of the track: the protagonist shows a side of insecurity that evidently pushes him to seek and accept even an extremely lived-out sexuality. He is a slave to the madame, but even before that, he is a slave to his own fear.

At first listen, the lyrics of the song seem to speak of a man victim of a succubus, a legendary female vampire who feeds on the sexual energies of unlucky males.
Delving into the track, it becomes evident that in a figurative way, the piece talks about a man's emotional and sexual dependency on a woman, and it’s unclear how aware and guilty she is of such dependency and how much the man's psychological issues truly matter.

My mind is no longer clouded but illuminated by a green and bizarre light.
I listen to the whole album from which the single is extracted, October Rust, and I am struck by the alternation of irony, bitterness, anger, and philosophical musings present in the record.

I have a new obsession, they’re called Type O Negative, and in the next three months, I'll have studied all their songs.

Three months have passed since I discovered Type O Negative.
I've finished and delivered the site I was working on, but my interest in TON hasn’t faded, on the contrary: today I’ll be receiving the not-quite-authorized biography on the frontman’s life, titled Soul On Fire.

I will never be as tall as him, nor will I ever have his long hair or thick beard, deep voice, or his four testicles (something he often joked about, given his voice).
However, I think that a track like Love You To Death manages, along with a few other pieces, to shed light on the great virtues of this band, namely being oneself beyond the exterior shell and appearance that would seem to suggest otherwise.
Type O Negative didn’t change in twenty years of activity, always dressed in black, always extremely violent, horny, or sad. Or maybe they changed a lot, along with their lives, but few noticed.

Surfing the web, I discovered that Peter Steele died a little over ten years ago, after battling alcohol dependency which he had since his youth, cocaine which he developed only at 35, and probably compulsive eating and sexual behavior.
Many aspects of Steele’s character and his experiences make him interesting in my eyes: to name a few examples, his being politically incorrect, his excessiveness in every aspect, his great sensitivity, and attachment to his roots, which he struggled with for almost his entire life and accepted only in the final years.
Like many rock stars of his time, Peter lived through excesses, spent time on probation and then imprisoned after assaulting a man guilty of cuckolding him with his girlfriend; later he was interned in a psychiatric clinic for a sort of TSO (compulsory health treatment) to which he was directed "because" of his sisters, and for this, he broke relations with the family for a while, only to reconcile with them in the following two years.

What a life, eh!, really intense: if this doesn’t mean to burn instead of fading away slowly, I really wouldn’t know what it does mean.

In the two years preceding his death, Steele gave up cocaine for good and almost completely quit alcohol (by his admission, he would allow himself one or two glasses of wine occasionally, never more), quickly getting back in good shape.
The concerts, which until 2008 had seen a progressive decline in the physical form of our bassist and singer, were starting to see him as a protagonist on stage again, albeit chubbier and with a voice beginning to show the wear of age, besides years of substance and alcohol abuse.
The last concert was on Halloween 2009 and, from the few good-quality videos on the net, must have been his swan song: he finally managed to stand throughout the concert and sing decently again. He was ready to make a comeback and turn the TONs into the "new Motorhead," as said by drummer Johnny Kelly in an interview.

According to some videos found on YouTube, dating about a month before his death, Steele seemed to have returned in shape: the long hair and long very thick beard, certainly well-dyed, his expression very serene and present compared to interviews from three years earlier, all indicated that Peter had started taking care of himself again.
His death came from a sepsis that also caused the rupture of an aneurysm, at a time when his health was quite good: a simple run to the emergency room would have saved, or at least lengthened, his life.

One aspect that I personally find really interesting is that Steele returned to faith before dying: signs of this were already visible in the last studio album Dead Again in 2007, but this was openly admitted by Steele only in a long interview for a webzine around autumn 2009.
Beyond the personal beliefs of me or you who reads, I believe this is a sign that Steele was not at all reckless but, on the contrary, lived asking himself many questions about his own life, and many of his "desperate" songs actually expressed a form of seeking truth.

His death marks the end of the TONs, but after 10 years their memory is still very much alive among fans and honored by the Silvertomb, a band that includes the already mentioned Johnny Kelly and Kenny Hickey, the former guitarist of the Drab Four.

I don't know if I came late or if Steele disappeared too soon but, fortunately, it is never too late to discover good music.