TYPE O NEGATIVE – Symphony For The Devil

Have the Type O Negative fans been longing for a Typo O Negative live DVD? Yes, they have indeed. Now, finally, it is here: Symphony For The Devil … but, will it please anyone else but the Devil?

The show that’s recorded is the band’s 1999 appearance at the Bizarre Festival in Germany. That makes the live material on the DVD more than six years old. “Everything Dies” is the only track included from the World Coming Down album released the same year. In other words, you get no live version of “Pyretta Blaze,” the aforementioned album’s finest moment. This means too, of course, that you’ll find no songs at all from their latest studio album, Life Is Killing Me (2003).

It’s fine that their Bizarre Festival appearance was a big event, and it’s cool with a live DVD showing tens of thousands of people in front of the stage … but these are not surroundings the fans normally would associate with the band. Most fans would find it more representative to watch Type O Negative in a more intimate and darker indoor location, where all the attendants are the band’s own fans, not a festival crowd.

However, the DVD’s 5.1 sound is great, and the production bases itself upon enough cameras to provide a great variation of angles and clips throughout show. The DVD will also be available with a CD single, containing three never before released tracks.

The ball opens with the intro of “In The Flesh” from Pink Floyd’s The Wall before the band does their take on Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl.” Throughout the set, songs from Slow Deep And Hard, Bloody Kisses, and October Rust are neatly interweaved so that the show is all the way balancing evenly on all three of the strongest legs of the band’s discography. As mentioned, “Everything Dies” is the only song you’ll get from World Coming Down, and Origin Of Feces is only represented by “Are You Afraid?” (see track list below for more).

For some strange reason, some of the songs put together side by side on the same DVD track. “Everything Dies” and “My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend,” for example, are combined on the same track, so if you want to listen to nothing but the latter, you have to fast forward through all of “Everything Dies” to get to it. Annoying. Luckily enough, Peter Steel and Co’s performances are good enough for you to live through a couple of songs in a row.

The extra material is surprisingly poor. There’s really nothing to come back to after watching it once.

What you get is:
– Hardly informative band member bios.
– A thirty minute nonsense interview made by Fuse TV.
– A still picture gallery showing 30+ photos from the band member’s private albums, covering each guy’s childhood, youth, and grown-up stages. This is absolutely the most fun part of the DVD.
– More than half of an hour of behind-the-scenes handycam footage. These clips show nothing but uncreative tour bus pranks, toilet humor, and general rubbish (e.g., Peter Steel farting … Josh Silver showing his balls …). This should really have been a menu selection on its own, so it would be easy to ignore, but no. This behind-the-scenes footage is, provokingly enough, cut up into about 6 blocks, and put in-between the live songs. Not good.

It is strange that the band hasn’t chosen to include some more interesting and informative stuff; something for the fans to chew on and digest. The official Type O Negative Web page, www.TypeONegative.net, has contained nothing but a forum for ages. That’s not very forthcoming for the fans. What about including the Type O Negative music videos after the 2003 After Dark DVD? The ironical and fun “I Don’t Wanna Be Me” video would alone add more humor to this release than all the stupid handycam material combined.

The conclusion is clear; this DVD could have been so very much better. The Bizarre show is sure a fine gig, but doesn’t capture the true face of Type O Negative. And, there are so many live concert DVDs being released these days, so if a band wants to compete, it really has to add some more thought through and valuable bonus material.

Tracklist

In The Flesh (intro, Pink Floyd cover)
Cinnamon Girl (Neil Young cover)
Der Untermensch (intro)
Too Late Frozen
Xero Tolerance (intro)
In Praise Of Bacchus
Jesus Hitler (intro)
Kill All The White People
Cornucopia
Wolf Moon (Including Zoanthropic Paranoia)
Everything Dies
My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend
Are You Afraid?
Gravitational Constant
Black Sabbath (intro, Black Sabbath cover)
Christian Woman
Love You To Death
Black No. 1