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Rating:
A blast.
And simultaneously the last testimony of the first and wild incarnation of Type 0 Negative, those still firmly anchored to the hardcore tinged with thrash derived from Carnivore, to the most apocalyptic industrial flavored terrifying doom, to verbal provocations and social invectives.
Already from the illustrative cover (a close up of our mythical Peter Steele's manually dilated sphincter), the album in question recaptures the acidly sarcastic vein that had proven to be the winning weapon of the previous "Slow, deep and hard".
In short, the story of how this fake live was conceived is quite well known and at the very least ridiculous: Monte Conner, the boss of Roadrunner Records, the label that published both Carnivore before and TON later, after the unexpected success of the previous full-length album (which made headlines mainly for the truly black humor and iconoclastic and provocative fury contained in the lyrics, as well as obviously for the apocalyptic originality of the musical proposal) and the related (and highly contested) European tour, compelled the four New Yorkers to an absurd live recorded album, subsidizing it with just a few thousand dollars. So they decided that with that money they would buy some new instruments and with the meager remainder, they would celebrate by purchasing low-quality vodka.
Ok, but what about the live album?
Simple, they transported all the necessary equipment to the basement of keyboardist Josh Silver, staged a fake gig located at Brighton Beach seasoning it with overdubs of screaming and unruly audience, comically recreating the lousy atmosphere that welcomed them in the old continent, distorting the songs from the previous album, changing their names, also adding tasty and grotesque gems like the TON version of the Hendrix classic "Hey Joe", here adapted into "Hey Pete" with a sacrilegious rearrangement of the lyrics included, in short a really well-performed play.
Especially when you think about the vivid imagination of our guys who manage to decompose songs like "Gravity" (originally called "Gravitational Constant: G = 6.67 x 10-8 cm-3 gm-1 sec-2 ") depending on the insults they receive, how "Kill you tonight" ("Xero Tolerance", also citing the name of the pseudo live location) gets stopped when on the fictitious stage fall (and break) as many fictitious glass bottles or how the "audience" welcomes the band for the opener "I Know You're Fucking Someone Else" ("Unsuccessfully Coping With The Natural Beauty of Infidelity" for those who didn't know), with the relative sharp-natured response from the colossal frontman.
Ultimately, an exceedingly irreverent, outrageously ridiculous, and wonderfully entertaining work (especially for those who are well-versed in English, enough to enjoy the numerous skits that often interrupt the tracks, with the corresponding exchange of insults between the band and the supposed audience), also well-recorded, in which the musical prowess of our band members emerges astonishingly (beyond jesting, they know how to draw truly terrifying and deviant soundscapes) and that "Fuck off and die" attitude, which in my opinion makes the first TON the true heirs of the best punk tradition (I'm only talking about attitude here, I hope it's clear that our guys have little to do with the disciples of Malcolm McLaren & co.), all seasoned with typically Anglo-Saxon dark humor (or New York if you prefer, but I assure you there's a striking resemblance).
The most interesting chapter they reserve for us at the end: we are talking about the covered (not live) version of the Black Sabbath classic "Paranoid" whose success, in my opinion, not only matches the original but even, capturing its most intimate soul, stands out and comes to life on its own thanks to a profound transformation, which contemplates a more dark, oppressive, melancholic, and depressed mood, truly capable of astounding the unsuspecting listener still in stitches from the previous laughter caused by the theater of earlier.
Take life with more irony, that's the advice from the Brooklyn four.
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