Digital metal?

Type O Negative and Marilyn Manson

by Carly Carioli

Like some mutant cross-pollination of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Spinal Tap, another super-goofy heavy-metal Halloween has descended upon us. For Count Chocula ambiance, there's Type O Negative's October Rust (Roadrunner), an album that resurrects pop metal's sweet-tooth balladry for the post-death-metal, post-goth demographic (hereafter to be known as the Urban Decay Cosmetics generation). Not to be outdone, Marilyn Manson dig up Freddie Mercury and other phantoms of rock opera on their Trent Reznor-produced industrial-glam concept album, Antichrist Superstar (Nothing/Interscope). Neither release is musically enthralling or even especially spooky. But like a drive-in double bill they're good for some cheap, mindless exploitation -- something punk's proletarianism and Alternative Nation's PC politeness have squeezed into the margins -- and a few hearty guffaws. Some of the laughs are even intentional.

New York's Type O Negative's confectionery doom and gloom is based in Scandinavian "Black Metal," an offshoot of American death metal characterized by sterile, glossy distortion, ethereal keyboards, and an obsession with Nordic earth-deity folklore. Type O whittle most of the genre's Wagnerian orchestral impulses down to easily digestible saccharine-coated melodies, recast its icy moodiness as lushly resplendent dark-forest pagan mysticism, and trade death metal's aggro-boy psychopathology for goth rock's cartoonishly morbid romanticism with titles like "Love You to Death," "Die with Me," and "Burnt Flowers Fallen."

The Nordic crypto-mythological stuff comes to a head when bassist/vocalist Peter Steele sings "I'm the Green Man," which is just patently funny (who does he think he is, the Jolly Green Giant?). But even he seems to realize this. "When I first wrote the song," he says in a Roadrunner press release, "I wrote it about the Celtic embodiment of nature. But the thought occurred to me that when I worked for the Parks Department, these kids at the playground used to call me the green man."

Nowadays they call Steele a bona fide pin-up (thanks to his spread in Playgirl last year), and he plays up the beefcake for all it's worth, masking his churlish Brooklyn "youse guys" accent with a continental rolled-r's delivery -- sort of the metal equivalent of So Cal punk rockers who sound British. "I'll do anything," he thunders on "Be My Druidess" in his best Jolly Green baritone, "to make you come." For the boys and the lesbians, there's "My Girlfriend's Girlfriend," a twist on the I-got-two-babes songs Warrant and Poison used to do so well. Like much of October Rust (and this is, oddly enough, what's made Type O Negative a token metal favorite at glossy rock mags), the song's melodies are hopelessly derivative of ultra-sheen mainstream pop, in this case suggesting Ian Curtis doing the Cars' "My Best Friend's Girl" and elsewhere suggesting Glenn Danzig off on a Sgt. Pepper-via-Smashing Pumpkins psychedelic bender.

Marilyn Manson, who come from the death-metal hotbed of Miami but probably owe more thematic props to 2 Live Crew, are derivative of a whole different set of folks. Numero uno on the list would have to be their buddy Trent Reznor, the guy singlehandedly responsible for "discovering" them, for taking them on his big stadium tours, and apparently for lending them all the keyboard effects left on the studio floor after the Downward Spiral sessions. Antichrist Superstar, their fourth release, is a total bomb -- a third-generation cyberpunk knockoff whose notion of innovation is bringing back the Mr. Roboto voice effect from Styx (on "Cryptorchid") and dotting formulaic thrash riffs with canned piano samples.

The "concept" on this disc has something to do with a worm becoming an angel, but as with the band's first album, it's little more than a soundtrack for the main event -- a live show where the über-lipsticked Manson straps on a dildo and parades his transgressive violent-femme act for an audience so bored out of its collective skull that it mistakes novelty for entertainment (or, worse, profundity). And though Superstar is a rather mirthless affair, it's kinda funny to watch Manson try really, really hard to be offensive and come up only with lines like "There's an apple in the pussy mouth/Now I'm the dinner whore" (from "Little Horn"), or "I am the faggot anti-Pope" ("1996"), or, my favorite, from "Irresponsible Hate Anthem": "I wasn't born with enough middle fingers." For that matter, neither was I -- I've got only two and there are, like, five guys in this band. Huh-huh.

Marilyn Manson play Avalon this Saturday, October 26, with NY Loose. Type O Negative play Avalon next Saturday, November 2, with Life of Agony and Manhole.