Review by Daniel for Type O Negative - Bloody Kisses (1993)

My life was incredibly interesting back in the middle of the 1990's, although that's not to suggest that it was always pleasant. I left home at 19 years of age to run away & live with my Philippino girlfriend who I was very much in love with at the time but she had a string of fairly serious character flaws that would see me being perennially engulfed in a world of drama & emotional turmoil. I would go through some enormous highs & lows during this period but would also have to grow up very fast. We were an intrinsic part of the Sydney metal scene at the time with our social network lying almost exclusively between the bands that I played in or with but the metal community was still quite small in Sydney during that period which led to a lot of crossover with the goth scene. Every weekend we'd all congregate in the CBD at a small pub called Century Tavern before heading off to the metal gigs on Friday nights & the goth night clubs on Saturday nights. Despite all of the chaos within my relationship, we felt like we were a part of something special, kind of a close-knit group of kindred spirits. Because of our gothic indulgences, the CD collection we would spin in our home would include a combination of metal & goth-related releases with most of the goth material being brought to my attention by my partner after she was introduced to it by her goth friends. Amongst those releases was Type O Negative's 1993 third full-length "Bloody Kisses", a record that she became enamored with after we'd repeatedly danced our asses off to the two big goth anthems "Christian Woman" & "Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All)" on dark, smokey, late-night dancefloors. I have to admit that I didn't find the album to appeal to me half as much as it did to her but I certainly didn't mind it. It would be 1996's incredible "October Rust" that would see me properly converted to Type O Negative though & it would become somewhat of a life-changer & a crutch for me after our tragic break-up. I'd subsequently follow the band into 1999's excellent "World Coming Down" fifth album after Ben purchased it on CD & those two records would be where my Type-O sweet spot would remain for the next 25 years. I'm not sure I've returned to "Bloody Kisses" in all that time to be honest & some of that may be due to the memories that are tied with it but my curiosity has been peaked recently after I noticed just how divisive our members opinions seem to be on it. Let's see how it's fared all this time later.

The production jobs on "October Rust" & "World Coming Down" both played a major role in their appeal with the glistening, full sound of the former & the cold, suffocating one of the latter being almost as important as the music itself. The sound of "Bloody Kisses" isn't as fully realised in my opinion. It sounds a little thinner but isn't bad as such. The signature down-tuned, fuzzy bass & guitar tone is obviously there but I don't think that the bigger sections of the album reach the same heights as the weight of the combined sound isn't as substantial. It's a very lllllooonnnnggg record though with the total run time amounting to a massive 73 minutes, a factor that does have an impact on my enjoyment of the overall package if I'm being honest. It feels like the band have needlessly attempted to extend "Bloody Kisses" & this comes very much at the expense of consistency with the album containing a whole string of different subgenres, often amounting to short interlude-style pieces with greatly varying degrees of success. There can be no doubt that "Bloody Kisses" contains some very strong material but I'd suggest that it also showcases some very misguided creative endeavours & a questionable sense of humour.

Yes, humour has always played a part in the Type O Negative experience & I for one wish that they'd opted to keep it out of their musical lives because we have very different ideas about what is funny & I don't think there's much of a place for humour in gothic metal anyway, is there? I mean, isn't the whole attraction meant to be the dark, brooding yet still quite beautiful atmospheres being created? I would have thought so anyway & Type O Negative have regularly crossed the boundary walls of that aesthetic over the years but rarely as often as they do on "Bloody Kisses". Take the opening track "Machine Screw" for example which seems to be a depiction of a woman having sex with a machine. Does that really present femininity in a way that women will be proud of? Personally, I find it to be quite repulsive & offensive to women & wish the band had simply got on with creating the wonderfully emotive gothic metal they've become known for. I'm aware that women find deep-voiced front man Pete Steele to be really attractive but can we really overlook these failings? He clearly has a warped view of sexuality in my opinion & I find it to make me feel really uncomfortable at times. We'd already heard him pushing the politically correct line further than it should go on the Carnivore records & I for one wish that he'd left it with his previous band.

Anyway... you'll rarely find a record that's more inconsistent & driven entirely by its highlights as "Bloody Kisses". The best material generally takes the form of the longer songs & can reach some fairly transcendent levels at times, generally off the back of Steele's miserable tales of loss & the interesting melodic decisions the band have made to accompany him. The doomy title track is the clear classic here for me personally while I also really enjoy "Christian Woman", the clever cover version of Seals & Croft's "Summer Breeze" & solid closer "Can't Lose You". A couple of the interludes are really cool too such as the industrial "Dark Side of the Womb" & dark ambient piece "3.0.I.F." but then we have to balance those highlights out against a string of poor creative decisions & silly, tongue-in-cheek humour through tracks like "Fay Wray Come Out & Play", "Kill All The White People", "Set Me On Fire", "We hate Everyone" & "Too Late: Frozen". Thankfully the stronger material outweighs & overpowers the weaker inclusions, perhaps only due to the increased length afforded to the more significant tracks on the fourteen-song tracklisting.

Despite its failings, "Bloody Kisses" isn't a bad record when viewed holistically. It's simply not the classic release its so often reported to be though & never comes close to approaching the two records that succeeded it, particularly "October Rust" which resides a good two steps above this effort. For that reason, I've often found myself struggling to understand the hype around "Bloody Kisses" which is often referred to as the band's finest moment by some fans. I simply can't see it while I'm sitting through some of the sillier tunes included here & even the best material like the title track serves as a reminder that Type O Negative would do that stuff even better in years to come.

For fans of Moonspell, Paradise Lost & later Woods of Ypres.