Band:	Type O Negative
Album:	World Coming Down
Style:	Doom metal, Gothic metal
Release date:	September 1999

01. Skip It
02. White Slavery
03. Sinus
04. Everyone I Love Is Dead
05. Who Will Save The Sane?
06. Liver
07. World Coming Down
08. Creepy Green Light
09. Everything Dies
10. Lung
11. Pyretta Blaze
12. All Hallows Eve
13. Day Tripper (Medley) [The Beatles cover]

Peter Steele... what a guy, eh? I must admit, I'm a tad envious of this fellow. Who wouldn't want to be tall as a lamp post, while singing in a cult Alternative/Gothic band and doing extraordinary amounts of hot chicks and cocaine at the same time? There are a few downsides, true. One might argue that posing naked for Playgirl, only to find out that the majority of its subscribers are actually gay men is a real downer, but you'd have to be a real homophobe to say that... ugh, right? Still, our prematurely deceased friend was either quite a miserable person, or he presented himself as such. And that's what Type O Negative is about: a way for a depressed, negative, cynical and possibly bi-polar person who doesn't exactly know if he fits in this world to express himself via music. And what interesting music it is.

World Coming Down, perhaps this band's darkest album, is named most appropriately. I don't know exactly what Pete has been going through when he was writing these songs, but the album indeed captures and successfully portrays what goes on inside a person's mind when his entire world comes crashing down around him, when he is unable to pull himself out of the debris that the crash caused. Ever felt like many gothic metal bands attempt to paint depression as something abstract, as some vague concept of beauty achievable only through art? World Coming Down has a big "FUCK THAT" written all over it when it comes to this subject. Depression is not something abstract, it is abundantly present every day and it is most certainly not something even remotely beautiful. It is a tormenting, agonizing feeling that just won't go away and makes everything you do seem completely meaningless and pointless. This is the point that World Coming Down is trying to make.

Musically speaking, we're looking at slightly more than a hour worth of a heavy, buzzing musical concoction, with doom and gothic metal at its core, noticeably bluesy melodies wrapped up in a somewhat industrial guitar tone. There is no significant variety to speak of: guitars drag painfully slowly, drums pound in an equally doom-ish fashion, fixing the stage for Steele's mournful baritone and occasional organ-sounding synths. More stripped down and basic-sounding than its predecessors, this seemingly monotonous approach works wonders to create the desired oppressive, lonely mood. Some tracks feature more dynamic choruses, but there is very little here that you could call catchy or fun.

While people generally prefer the more acclaimed Bloody Kisses or October Rust, to me, this album will remain Type O Negative's crowning achievement and an epitome of what they have been: not the Victorian, romanticized gothic metal, but the dirty, forlorn, drug-addled one. It's not a classic, due to too many weaker tracks, but the better ones will indeed take you to the depths of Steele's emotional abyss.