Type O Negative — Dead Again

I’ll have to admit I’d rather lost interest in Type O Negative after the disappointing World come Down, it seem their magic musically touched had slipped away. So it was with great interest I read the press release for Dead again claiming this was a return to ala Blood Kissers/ October Rust. I’m happy to report this does live up to the hype and is really rather good and solid album. I guess for the most part focusing more on the melodic, textured feel of their sound, but still with some nice heaviness in places.

Like the old days we’re back to cramming the cd to it’s near limit at 77 minuets with hardly a missed step along the way, well maybe a few but that always added extra charm to the band. As you'll expect theres a mix of; metallic melodic, doom, and 70’s pop rock with goth touches. There’s also some surprising upbeat almost punky type traces here too, nodding back to the days of Hard, deep slow and of course Steel's previous band Carnivore. We also have a great feel of textured  instruments and sound depth, loads of little audio details appearing over time.

There’s even surprising  clean singer-songwriter ballard like  piano on the  start of  September Sun with Steel’s deeply melodic vocal hovering over the top, before the guitars come crashing in. We also have Steel going almost bizarrely operatic in places, as his voice is  layered up in  foreign tongue chanted calls, really showing steel's amazing vocal scale especially for a man in his forties. But  all the praise mustn’t just go to Steel as the rest of the band are playing at the top of their game been melodic, heavy and atmopshric. Another surprise is a female singing and finger clicking moments on Halloween in heaven, but though it all this is still very much a Type O Negative record it never goes too sweet. It just shows like their best work their willing to experimental adding surprising elements, that on paper sound a little dodge but just work so well.

With Dead Again they’ve made another great record to get lost in, surprising, meomberble and very Type O Negative. That will find it’s self rushing up near to the top of my end of the year list. This corpse is very much alive and bloody kicking with fresh vigour and razor sharpe creative edge.