Type O Negative Bloody Kisses CD

Type O Negative includes: Josh Silver, Peter Steele. Kenny Hickey.
Additional personnel: Paul Bento (sitar, tambura).
Recorded at Systems Two, Brooklyn, New York.
Bloody Kisses was Type O Negative's major step forward, maintaining the long, repetitive song structures of albums past, but adding more atmospheric synths and left-field Beatlesque pop melodies. The quantum leap in songwriting is what really drives the album, but it also coincides with a newfound sense of subtlety. Aside from a couple of smart-aleck rants, Peter Steele's dark, melodramatic songs address heartbreak and loneliness in what sounds at first like deadly serious overkill. But not far beneath the surface, he's also satirizing his own emotional excesses, and those of goth rock in general. Steele's lyrics gleefully wallow in goth clichés -- sex, death, Christianity, vampires, more sex, and death -- and he even sings most of the album in an intentionally vampiric croon straight from the depths of an ancient crypt. Among other things, that delivery lends hilarious irony to a glum cover of Seals & Crofts' soft rock hit "Summer Breeze"; it's also perfect for the deadpan mockery of the goth-girl character sketch "Black No. 1." Hardly any of the songs need to be as long as they are, but that ridiculous excess is all part of Type O Negative's sly, twistedly affectionate send-up of goth rock conventions. Though it sounds like a funeral, Bloody Kisses' airy melodicism and '90s-style irony actually breathed new life into the flagging goth metal genre, and the album is an often overlooked forerunner to alternative metal's limited appropriation of goth style. ~ Steve Huey
Type O Negative has delivered either death-metal's first prog-rock concept album, or its "Good Vibrations"...or maybe both. Either way BLOODY KISSES is one of the most alluringly weird albums in the history of the genre--an hour-long ode to break-ups and suicide that mixes acoustic guitars and synthesizers with metallic power chords, and lush choral harmonies with a lead vocalist who sounds like he died sometime before the recording process began. That last bit is meant as a compliment; if you're going to attempt an eleven-minute suicide dirge like the title track, you better be either Leonard Cohen or dead, and Type O's Peter Steele has a bit of both in him.
For most of BLOODY KISSES, though, Steele and crew come alive as pop studio experimentalists in a field dominated by anti-pop, anti-studio shredders. "Christian Woman" is a three-part epic that ebbs and flows with a slow metal groove, pretty background vocals, synthesized strings, and a morose lead voice that spells out a story of sex, death and Jesus. "Too Late: Frozen" places a bright pop chorus over chord changes that echo Bruce Springsteen's "Tunnel Of Love." There's a surf-y organ line buried in "Blood & Fire." The best pop joke of them all, if that's what it is, is a heavily psychedelic cover of Seals & Crofts' "Summer Breeze"; try listening to the song (which is done straight) while reading the lyric sheet (which is not).Kerrang (Magazine) (p.56) - "[T]he band specialised in deep, slow, sensual thrusts laced with black humour and the occasional slash of fired-up punk menace."
Record Collector (magazine) (p.98) - 3 stars out of 5 -- "[The album] veered from hardcore punk via straightahead MTV fodder to ambient noise experiments....It's still highly entertaining."