Type O Negative – (7) – World Coming Down

From Type O Negative’s fifth album “World Coming Down”, released on September 21, 1999 on Roadrunner Records. This is seen as the band’s darkest and most personal album. As with the band’s previous album, October Rust, this album also features a “joke intro”: in this case, the intro, appropriately titled “Skip It”, is 11 seconds of staccato band noise, meant to sound as if the listener’s CD player is skipping. Cassette versions featured the noise of a tape being “eaten” by the tape player. The track ends with what is presumably guitarist Kenny Hickey shouting, “Sucker!” The first song, “White Slavery”, deals with cocaine addiction. Two other songs, “Everyone I Love Is Dead” and “Everything Dies,” touch on the difficulties of watching family members and loved ones die. The band’s awkward and dirgeful song “Who Will Save the Sane?” incorporates, among other oddities, Peter Steele reciting the number pi truncated to 9 decimal places (3.141592653). The album contains three “soundscape” tracks, which are named after internal organs, as segues between songs. Each of these songs is intended to suggest the possibilities of the deaths band members may suffer: “Sinus” as death from cocaine use, “Liver” as death through alcohol abuse, and “Lung” as death by smoking. In an ironic foreboding, Peter once told a close friend that he could not bear to listen to “Sinus” after it was mixed and completed, because the sound of the heartbeat escalating to its furious pace after the suggested …
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