How a metal band from Brooklyn summed up Black Mouth in song – before it was conceived.
Type O Negative has been one of my favorite bands since a friend introduced me to their 1993 Bloody Kisses album. I always enjoyed their slow and heavy-yet-catchy tunes, and especially the deadpan, wryly self-deprecating humor of Peter Steele’s lyrics.
There can be absolutely no doubt that when I started work on my graphic novel Sortmund in 1999, I had been heavily influenced by the glum, bitterly romantic sensibilities of Type O Negative. Enough so that we seem to have shared some kind of fortuitous inspiration.
Now, if Bloody Kisses had been a comic that I appreciated to the same level, I might have bothered to investigate what different versions of the abum were available but, I’m less of a geek with music than with comics.
That’s why I didn’t discover until several years later that Bloody Kisses had also been released as a digipak, with differently ordered tracks and a single bonus track, the brooding Suspended in Dusk. Sure, I later acquired the track as part of the bonus CD for 2003′s Life is Killing Me, but really … who listens to bonus CDs?
Recently, I threw all of my Type O records on to the old MP3 player and went through the lot chronologically. When I got to Suspended… two things struck me; a slight annoyance that I had never given it a proper listen, terrific melancholy tune that it is; and listening to the lyrics, a sensation best summed up as “What the fuck …?!”
The lyrics, describing the eternal (un)life of a vampire, directly echoed some of the themes I had tackled in Sortmund – religion, life contrasted by immortality, and literally what the band calls ‘the shadow realm’. That term is likely to raise an eyebrow with readers of Sortmund.
Below are the lyrics, with emphasized stanzas that I in my excitement found reminiscent of my own work:
“Damn me Father, for I must sin…”
Four centuries of this damned immortality
Yet, I did not ask to be made. Why?
I will never again know your sun upon my face
Or the comfort of a grave
I am not alive and I am not dead
This is Hell on earth
How can I possibly explain this eternal youth?
When I can do nothing, but sit by
As my loves grow old and wither
And with each of them, take a fragment of my heart
And prolong this eternal winter
It is October’s perpetual agony
It is the shadow realm
Father, please forgive him
For he knows not what to do
With every victim I pray
pray for my own death
And as much as I love the night
I curse the moon’s eerie glow
This bloodlust that drags me to forever
and ever
The toxic rays of dawn that condemn me to limbo
I am cursed to dwell in grey Autumn twilight
I am suspended in dusk
If you have no idea what I’m going on about, you either need to
- Listen to Type O Negative. If that will require buying their albums, go ahead and do that. Especially the early albums are highly recommended.
- Read Sortmund. If that will require buying the book, etc. Consider buying two for good luck.
or: - A combination of 1 and 2.
As an added bonus, here is a hilariously nitpicking definition of “Gothic Metal” vs “Goth Metal” on Last FM. Scroll about two thirds down to the paragraph entitled “Gothic vs Goth controversy”. First reader to read more than five sentences without crying “What the hell is the difference and who cares?” wins a signed copy of Sortmund!