Type O Negative - Haunted

just listen to the whole damned thing

All-eyes on the rarest blood Type to follow wild down-upstart Bloody Kisses, and Petrus and Co (new drummer Johnny Kelly, better than Sal), providing disclaimers and hopes the album isn’t too disappointing, deliver a great, grand luscious force of volume and nature. No filler, no gimmicks, no shouting, no hate, the band distancing itself far away from Brooklyn, its scenes, and into the organic nature of sound and instrumentation, in perhaps the most orchestrated capture of a season and its smells and tastes. Peter is at his most disarming here, narrating love, romance, sadness, hedonism, lupine and ghost lore with delicate attention to the orange, yellow, green, brown wall of guitar, cymbal, and keyboard drone, more ambient than attacked. October Rust grows its strongest as it travels deep into the indigenous, its opening outskirts a little forced (I hate, hate, hate the coda for Be My Druidess) and hokey (My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend). It isn’t until Burnt Flowers Fallen and its wickedly brilliant minimalism that the album grows moss around its ears and becomes a fully realized, breathing, sexual creature with no piece of its anatomy to overlook. Closer Haunted, in its 10 minutes of grueling throes, is the damned saddest thing I’ve ever heard, a Floyd-ian nod, extracting all said life essence gathered but not without a final, brief, reasoning of sunlight. Tragically underrated as a remarkable album, a classic, one that ensnared a theme, drank its wisdom, then let it fly into atmosphere, never to be repeated or emulated. Essential.