“I knew of Peter long before the Type O Negative days – I grew up on Staten Island, so I used to go see Carnivore play at L’Amour,” Monte says.
Or they were until A&R legend Monte Conner fought Type O’s corner, anyway.
While Peter felt unsure about continuing his relationship with the label – feeling they had failed to capitalise on promoting Carnivore – as it turns out, the label were also getting cold feet. During his time in Carnivore, Peter had signed a multi-album deal with Roadrunner Records and while the band had since split, Peter was technically still tied into the contract. The crowd weren’t the only holdover from Carnivore that Type O Negative had to contend with. They didn’t really understand songs like I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else – going from thrashy to half-time suddenly, or following it up with Prelude to Agony which was really slow – they hated it!” The skinhead following still showed up at the early Repulsion shows expecting the wild mosh pits of Carnivore so we were mixing it up and throwing those things in there. “In the early days we’d end up playing three or four Carnivore songs in our set, stuff like Predator, Race War or Jesus Hitler.
“Before Bloody Kisses the audiences were thrash-core guys with long hair and hardcore skinheads that made for a tougher audience,” Sal remembers. Though they retained Carnivore’s core thrash/hardcore crossover sound, the inclusion of elements like 80s synth-pop keyboards and glacial doom metal proved challenging for fans who were expecting Peter to continue down the same path. Type O Negative’s early years were often spent trying to extricate themselves from the legacy of Carnivore, as while the band hadn’t made major waves in the wider American music scene they had earned a passionate local following. Initially calling themselves Repulsion, they later changed their name to Sub-Zero and finally Type O Negative. The only recourse is to one-up the others by going all-in on the Gothic with yet further Gothic flourishes, regardless of whether they add anything of value to the design.By summer 1989, Peter and Sal had recruited local musicians Kenny Hickey and Josh Silver, working on songs that Peter had written for a third Carnivore album. This is indeed a problem for whoever plays in the Gothic genre. Of course, the astute reader will have noticed that everyone and their mom has blackletter(-inspired) wordmarks for logos. It probably speaks for itself: the lettering style is inspired by a Gothic – which is basically synonymous with blackletter – type. Gothic Metal is a broadly defined genre, comprising of two main subgenres: on the one hand there’s bands that grew out of the Death-Doom genre ( Anathema, My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost), favoring gloomy, introspective atmosphere over outward bombast, and on the other hand there’s melodic symphonic bands that emerged instead from the more uplifting Power Metal ( After Forever, Tristania, Within Temptation) and who are really only “Gothic” in dress and name.
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