It's time once again for one of my patented Semi-Whenever-I-Get-Time
Ladder Match! Wherein I will take two completely unrelated bands and
rank their discographies against one another to see who winds up being
the better one, much to the disappointment of all onlookers.
The rules are simple: I rank the albums of the two bands against each other and assign points down the line. So for example, if there are 15 albums for each band, the best record of the bunch will get 30 points, the next will get 29, after that will get 28, and so on down to 1. The winner will obviously be determined by whoever has more points, so in this arbitrary system it's better to have a more consistent career on the whole. Say Band A has the five best albums and also the bottom ten, they'll end with 195 points, while the band that sweeps spots six thru twenty will end with 270. And also, since I like to make shit contradictory and complicated, if the bands do not have an equal number of records, the band with more albums will have their middlemost album excluded from ranking, because if I do a list with Morbid Angel, you bet your ass I'll want Illud Divinum Insanus to count for the same reason I'd want Altars of Madness to count. You don't get to sweep your mistakes under the rug here on Ladder Match. This is how I balance consistency with spikes in quality, deal with it, chumps.
Our matchup today (in patented "zero effort Microsoft Paint Abomination" fashion) is:
The rules are simple: I rank the albums of the two bands against each other and assign points down the line. So for example, if there are 15 albums for each band, the best record of the bunch will get 30 points, the next will get 29, after that will get 28, and so on down to 1. The winner will obviously be determined by whoever has more points, so in this arbitrary system it's better to have a more consistent career on the whole. Say Band A has the five best albums and also the bottom ten, they'll end with 195 points, while the band that sweeps spots six thru twenty will end with 270. And also, since I like to make shit contradictory and complicated, if the bands do not have an equal number of records, the band with more albums will have their middlemost album excluded from ranking, because if I do a list with Morbid Angel, you bet your ass I'll want Illud Divinum Insanus to count for the same reason I'd want Altars of Madness to count. You don't get to sweep your mistakes under the rug here on Ladder Match. This is how I balance consistency with spikes in quality, deal with it, chumps.
Our matchup today (in patented "zero effort Microsoft Paint Abomination" fashion) is:
It's October, which means it's the perfect time to highlight the quintessential Spooky Metal Band, Type O Negative. While they were the impetus for this particular feature, I didn't want to give them an easy win, so I'm stacking them up against one of my most listened-to artists over the last year or so, the Canadian Anarchist Punklords, Propagandhi. I do my best to make the opponents totally different from one another, but as always, there are going to be some tenuous similarities. Here we have two bands that started as some version of punk (hardcore for the former, skatershit for the latter) before evolving into something much more unique and defining their signature sound. But other than that, we have two very different legends in the ring this time. TON basically dominated the "gothic metal" subniche in a way that sounds almost nothing like what the term came to mean with the proliferation of Within Temptation and bands of that ilk, instead of having some gorgeous woman coo over lameass non-riffs, TON took an ugly eight foot tall dude and had him deeply croon over a very literal mixture of heavy metal and Fields of the Nephilim style goth rock. Propagandhi on the other hand started off with Fat Wreck style melodic punk that was so iconic and influential that NOFX themselves basically changed their entire sound to rip them off, before molding into a much more angry and metal-infused band of aggressive activists. They're both undisputed monarchs in their spheres and today I'm gonna reanimate Peter Steele's corpse so they can throw down in a Ladder Match.
I'm sorry, I love both of these bands but something had to come in last place, and this seemed like the easiest candidate. I do think this is a necessary component of Type O's canon, but at the same time it's without a doubt the most easily skippable. Type O has always had a black sense of humor, and this is without a doubt their funniest release, but it's still kind of a throwaway joke in the grand scope of things. The story goes that their record contract at the time stipulated that they needed to record a live album, so for their second album here they decided to basically just perform the first album again (with different song titles) in addition to a few covers and then dubbed in a bunch of fake crowd noises to simulate an antagonistic crowd. I think that's hysterical. Truly a middle finger to the moneymen above them and it's great to hear no cheers at all and all of the between-song banter being Steele telling the crowd to fuck off (the crowd chanting "FUCK! YOU! FUCK! YOU!" during the quiet part of "I Know You're Fucking Someone Else" is pure poetry) is wonderful. My problem is that, beyond the truly transformative covers of Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath, this consists entirely of tracks that you can hear better versions of on Slow, Deep, and Hard, and for that reason it's the only album out of either discography that I think you can totally pass up without missing much.
PROPAGANDHI 0 - TYPE O NEGATIVE 1
Like I mentioned up top, Propagandhi's 1993 debut, How to Clean Everything, was such an instantly influential blast of melodic punk aggression that even NOFX, one of the biggest bands in the genre and essentially the owner of Fat Wreck Chords itself, shifted their sound to more closely emulate it. It's one of the most influential punk albums of the 90s, but... man I just don't like it all that much! I think it's so underwhelming that I actually didn't bother listening to the rest of Propagandhi's superior catalog for years simply because I figured it'd be more of this. The reason I don't cover punk all that often despite listening to so much of it is because I simply haven't spent literally my entire life ensconced in the scene like I have with metal, so I just lack the language to analyze it as well, and I find myself struggling here for that exact reason. Like, it's fast and melodic and does the stuttery riff that every skate punk band in the universe does at minimum twice per song and says "fuck" a lot, but beyond that what can I really say about it? I know it predates Punk in Drublic but it's really just that sound. Chris Hannah's voice at this point was really nasally and bratty in a way that he would drop entirely in an album or two, and it works for the snotty attitude of the album itself, but it's really one of the weaker aspects of the album. Some of the elements that would go on to define the band's later albums are here to an extent (the band's caustic and sharply left-wing lyrics are the obvious thing) but the actual sound of this album is just so far removed from what I'd later love that I struggle to enjoy it on its own merits. Maybe that's unfair, but as it stands this is basically emblematic of all the things that made 90's punk so great, but the application of context makes it both better and worse. In the context of where the scene was at the time, this was incredible example of it, but in the context of the band's entire career, this was a very un-Propagandhi record that just so happened to kick off an incredible uber-Propagandhi career. If there's anything about it that's better than their later work, it's that I appreciate how much fun they obviously had with this one. There's a lot more comedy and youthful brashness in tunes like "Ska Sucks" and "This Might Be Satire" than they'd ever do in the future, and even the more serious tunes like "Anti-Manifesto" have some classic fun bits like the quick interjection of "By the way, I stole this riff" before a quick one second long shred. But regardless, this is without a doubt my least listened-to album of their career, with only "Anti-Manifesto" and "Stick the Fucking Flag Up Your Goddamn Ass, You Sonofabitch" remaining in my listening cycle whenever I go on a binge.
PROPAGANDHI 2 - TYPE O NEGATIVE 1
If there's any controversial entry in this feature, it's gonna be ranking October Rust so near the bottom. I get it, this is one of their most beloved albums, released at the peak of their popularity in the 90s, complete with like six of their most iconic tunes, but I dunno man I've never jived with this one all that much. That's not to say it's bad, neither band in this feature has a true stinker, but the mood they were evoking on this one just doesn't connect with me like some of their other albums do. I get why it's so beloved, there's no denying that this album is fucking lush. It has a gorgeous sound that's very floaty and romantic and it complements their lighter compositions this time around incredibly well. In terms of actually achieving what they were going for, October Rust knocks it out of the fucking park. Hell I'd even say they're very good at it and there's no denying the amount of classic tracks here. But frankly, objective critique is impossible when it comes to art and even though I think all of these components work wonderfully in tandem with one another, it just doesn't resonate with me. I think "Be My Druidess", "My Girlfriend's Girlfriend", "Wolf Moon", and "Red Water" are all fantastic songs, but even though the other classics like "Green Man", "In Praise of Bacchus", "Haunted", and especially "Love You to Death" are fundamentally similar, I skip them nearly every time I put the album on. I think that's actually my problem with the album as a whole, the mood is very static and it more or less hits the same note over and over again as it goes. It's a good note, but I know they're capable of so much more, and the fact that TON was notoriously bad at trimming the fat means that we're treated to basically 75 minutes of the same mood and it isn't overwhelming enough to really work. I don't care that this is one of their least heavy albums, the songs I like a lot aren't necessarily the heaviest ones on display, and you'll see later on that some of their best songs were their least metallic, but over an hour of lethargic romantic textures exhausts me in a bad way. If nothing else, this sports one of Steele's absolute best vocal performances. He was on top of his game in 96 and his deep baritone croon is at it's peak here.
PROPAGANDHI 2 - TYPE O NEGATIVE 4
Propagandhi's style shift was complete by this point in history, to the point that if you weren't familiar with them you'd never guess this was the same band that wrote How to Clean Everything, and that's not a bad thing. Their unique style of heady punk rock blended with the perfect amount of thrash metal to create an instantly identifiable sound was perfected already, and this is simply the least great of their great albums. Fundamentally this is pretty similar to the preceding album, but its main fault is that it's simply not as memorable as their other albums. I tend to refer to this album as "The one with 'A Speculative Fiction' and a bunch of other songs" and I've never been able to break away from that mindset. "A Speculative Fiction" is one of the best songs they ever wrote, perfectly exemplifying their aggressive punk that gets sidetracked with acoustic diversions and occasional thrash riffs, loaded with memorable moments (YOUR STUPID FUCKING LASER PUCKS WERE JUST THE START) with the dead-eyed seriousness that they'd carry throughout their career. The problem is that nothing else even comes close to the brilliance of "A Speculative Fiction". "Fixed Frequencies", "Fedallah's Hearse", and "Die Jugend Marschiert" keep the momentum going as best as they can, but ultimately this one just doesn't live up to the standard they set for themselves. Oddly enough this actually has a lot of similarities to October Rust when looked at in the context of both bands' careers. They're both the least good of their classic eras and second least good overall, they're both the fourth album out of seven and the second after their signature sound was solidified, they're both the lightest and most melodic of the bunch, and they both feature the best vocals. I adore Hannah's deeper register that he took on at the turn of the century and I love Todd Kowalski's super gruff secondary vocals that started once he joined after the first two albums, and neither of them have ever truly deteriorated but I'd say they're most impressive on Potemkin City Limits. Overall though, I think I can sum this up best by pointing out that the title track is on a different album and that kinda speaks to how much more important their other albums are when compared to this one.
PROPAGANDHI 6 - TYPE O NEGATIVE 4
I want to make clear that from this point forward, every album from both bands fucking rule. So I feel kinda bad putting Less Talk, More Rock on the low end of the list considering how much I love it, but that's the way the chips fall. The snotty vocals and abrasive lyrics are back from the debut, and while all of their music is explicitly anarchist and unavoidably political, I think this is their most directly political album, likely a reaction to how much people didn't get it when they first hit the scene. It's called Less Talk, More Rock because people would complain about them proselytizing and going into detail about what their songs were about onstage. The lyrics are more blunt than before since they were frustrated with people ignoring the message and just jamming to the tunes (the title track explicitly details how Hannah received anal sex and loved it and says everybody dancing to the song without listening to what he's saying is a pathetic nimrod who is now gay by the transitive property). Hell look at the border of the album art. They put "ANIMAL-FRIENDLY - ANTI-FASCIST - GAY-POSITIVE - PRO-FEMINIST" on the cover four fucking times so absolutely nobody could miss the point anymore. I get it that some people don't like bands being preachy even when they agree with them completely, but Propagandhi's unabashed hard-left message is one of my favorite things about them and they'd be exponentially worse if they didn't feel these things as hard and shout them as furiously as they do. "The Only Good Fascist is a Very Dead Fascist" would be a dumb throwaway joke song if it wasn't a vehicle for lyrics as vitriolic as they are (KILL THEM ALL AND LET A NORSE GOD SORT 'EM OUT). These songs get more and more relevant with each passing year and this one stands as probably the most timeless of everything they've done. This is still pure early/mid 90s punk (apart from "Rido De San Atlanta, Manitoba", which is a blast of pure old school hardcore) so they hadn't landed on their signature sound yet, but out of their more "normal punk" duology, this is the clearly superior album to me. It's more unique and direct than How to Clean Everything and really set the wheels in motion for what was to come down the line. I don't use the term "skatershit" as a pejorative, because I'm a huge sucker for the Fat Wreck sound, but I think that Propagandhi's skatershit era is great in the realm of skatershit but pales in comparison to almost everything else they'd do in the future, and the fact that Less Talk, More Rock is a bit more aggressive and experimental than the debut is precisely what makes it the superior album.
PROPAGANDHI 11 - TYPE O NEGATIVE 4
I'm sorry, but I think there's no way to talk about Life is Killing Me without spoiling a bit of what makes a later entry so great. World Coming Down is one of the most bleak and depressing albums ever written, with every single second sounding like your last moments as you die shitting yourself in a crack house. I suspect that Life is Killing Me was a deliberate attempt to do the exact opposite, because while WCD fully embraced the gothic/doom metal side of their sound, LIKM is all about their more fun and lighthearted poppy side. For that reason it's often seen as the worst TON album, but I don't agree. All of their best songs are the slow and gloomy ones throughout their career (for the most part) but they're equally good at just rocking out and having a good time. "I Like Goils", as problematic as it is from a lyrical standpoint, is without a doubt one of my favorite tunes in their entire oeuvre. Tracks like that and "I Don't Wanna Be Me" are just a barrel of fucking fun and I don't think there's a universe that exists where they don't appeal to the fun drunk in me. And even then, calling this "their pop album" kinda misses a huge amount of the tracks on display, because "Anasthesia" and "The Dream is Dead", potentially the two best songs on the album, are basically just truncated versions of their classic gloomy goth sound anyway. "Less Than Zero" absolutely would not have been out of place on Bloody Kisses. My chief complaint that applies to every Type O album, even the ones I adore wholeheartedly, is that they're all way too fucking long, and even though this is the second longest album of their career, the songs themselves err on the shorter side and even the long ones feel shorter than they are. They captured a very specific lightning in a bottle that they'd always hinted at being able to capture but never really went for before. Like, obviously the shortened radio edit of "Black no.1" isn't as good as the 11 minute version, but if that song was specifically written to be around 5 or 6 minutes, it would've worked fantastically and that's really what Life is Killing Me showcases. They have the ability to condense these songs into tighter packages and it turns out they're really fucking good at it. The entire B side is quality and everything on display is fantastic. Hell even their short punk cover of "Angry Inch" kicks ass and usually the best part of their covers is how they'd totally transform songs into lengthy dirges. I would never call this their best album, but it's definitely the most underrated.
PROPAGANDHI 11 - TYPE O NEGATIVE 10
Let it never be said that I'm some fun-policing wokescold who doesn't think "problematic faves" are acceptable. Slow, Deep, and Hard is a deeply misogynistic record on the whole (to say nothing of the frankly abhorrent racism in "Der Untermensch") but fuckin' hell man it's really god damned good. They hid behind the veneer of "it might be parody, it might not be, wink wink nudge nudge" thanks to Steele's time in Carnivore, and before people on the internet started caring about gross shit in pop culture (like me, for example) the excuse for this stuff was that they were holdovers from that band's edgy shtick. And man, that was believable because there's a lot of leftover hardcore and crossover thrash metal in this record. TON became known for their exemplary goth/doom metal but even when they were kicking the speed up and belting out some absurd aggression they still fuckin' smoked. "Unsuccessfully Coping with the Natural Beauty of Infedility" (sometimes "shortened" to the alternate title from The Origin of the Feces, "I Know You're Fucking Someone Else") kind of wraps everything TON would ever do into one package. It's quite lengthy at nearly 13 minutes, but it more than justifies its runtime by running through several different themes and moods, from frustrated hardcore punk to to their more signature gloomy doom, and the climactic chorus is so fucking catchy that it should be illegal. I haven't really talked about Josh Silver's keyboard work up to this point, but it's arguably the integral component to their sound, on par with the super fuzzy, bassy guitar tone and Steele's sensual baritone. It works so well here, on their most harsh and unrefined album, that it almost beggars belief. Like yeah, obviously it's an irreplaceable element that absolutely makes October Rust but I think it's even more impressive that he managed to be so prominent and so good on an album where he is by no means the focus. This is kind of similar to Life is Killing Me in the sense that I tend to think of it in terms of its best song and sort of forget about the rest, but every time I revisit it I'm reminded how much I love "Xero Tolerance", "Prelude to Agony", and "Gravitational Constant" as well. Every TON album is long, but I think this one does the best job of justifying its length due to how rough and experimental it was compared to the rest of their career. There really wasn't anything like this in 1991, and there isn't anything else like this throughout the band's career. It was a glorious one-off that saw the band spilling their guts on the studio floor and it amounted to off-kilter genius.
PROPAGANDHI 11 - TYPE O NEGATIVE 17
Whenever
a metal fan says they're interested in checking out some punk music, I
actually point to Propagandhi as the best entry point for a metalhead as
opposed to way more obvious bands that more clearly blur the line
between the two styles like DRI or Suicidal Tendencies or whatever. In
my eyes, if you want to get into a new style of music, it's kind of
pointless to cater to the tastes you already have instead of taking the
genre on its own merits. Propagandhi is my go-to because they're a punk band
with a punk ethos that play punk music by punk rules, but constantly throw little metal-isms all over the place. Failed States
is a great example of that tendency, because I'd argue this is their
heaviest, darkest, and most difficult album almost entirely because of
Chris's lifelong love of thrash seeping through the hardest (seriously,
he has a few official playlists on Spotify ostensibly highlighting his
favorite songs and like 95% of them are classic 80s thrash metal).
Songs like "Status Update" and the title track here are fucking
barnbuners, and something like "Rattan Cane" is actually full on
dissonant in its spastic chaos, with Kowalski's gruff, amelodic voice
absolutely battering the shit out of you. I haven't really talked about
Jord's drumming up to this point but he's a monster behind the kit here
more than arguably anywhere. There aren't a whole lot of legitimate
"storytellers" in punk rock, but Propagandhi excels at this and the more
experimental nature of Failed States really helps this element
of their sound shine. All of their lyrics read more like longform
poetry than cut up stanzas, and this is true of every album but it works
fucking beautifully with tracks as sprawling as "Lotus Gait" and "Note
to Self". That latter one is so fucking out there that it's actually
reminiscent of Tool of all bands in certain parts. While this isn't
their best album, I do think it's the most "Propagandhi" album out of
all Propagandhi albums. They leaned pretty wholeheartedly into their
metal influences to create a melodic hardcore album unlike any other,
and even within their own heavy as hell discography they amped the
heaviness up to extreme levels with this one. Without a doubt, Failed States
is their most experimental and daring album. They took a ton of risks
with the extreme variance in song lengths ("Status Update" barely cracks
sixty seconds while "Note to Self" is a full six minutes) and the
off-kilter angle they approached everything. They had their style
pretty solidly pegged down with the previous three albums and then took a
huge dose of Protest the Hero with this one and shoved it all through
an aggressive punk filter and landed on total brilliance. And it's only
their fourth best album somehow. (Initially I had this ranked a spot
lower, but upon relisten I was reminded how fucking incredible the
closing duo of "Lotus Gait" and "Duplicate Keys Icaro" was and had no
choice but to leapfrog Slow, Deep, and Hard. If TON ends up losing by a point, blame those two songs.)
PROPAGANDHI 19 - TYPE O NEGATIVE 17
Their most recent record as of this writing, Victory Lap copped some shit when it was released in 2017 for basically being just Failed States a second time, but honestly that criticism seems wildly off base to me. It has some superficial similarities for sure (tracks like "Comply/Resist" and "In Flagrante Delicto" get crazy heavy), but the overall color of the album is totally different. It almost feels optimistic in a way, which is actually a pretty new direction for a band of anarchists hell bent on exposing the shady underbelly of the world. I think this is mostly due to the abundance of quiet parts this time around. I haven't really mentioned it yet, but one of the reasons Propagandhi is so unique in the realm of melodic hardcore is their fearlessness in how frequently they'll shift the tempo down, and Victory Lap is probably the most reckless in how suddenly it'll shift from soft introspection to chaotic intensity. "Lower Order", for example, starts off with what it basically thrash mosh riff before abruptly shifting to clean guitar and bouncy pop melodies as Hannah details his road to veganism thanks to a forced hunting trip as a kid and his growing hatred with people who treat sentient animals like a stupid joke. "Tartuffle" sounds like a fun, almost Motorhead-esque tune until you realize the acerbic lyrics are pointed squarely at the punk scene itself (something they've railed against in the past) for treating their music like some performative self flagellation before fucking off to live their lives without internalizing the message at all, which like, damn dude just call me out by name next time. There's a feeling of hopeless resignation to more current events this time around, with some direct allusions to Trump and the NDP, and I think that less general and more timely approach is something that might make this album less poignant in the future, but in this current moment, it strikes me as one of their absolute best. Maybe it's not the intent, but the feeling I get from this is that the world is definitely, irreversibly fucked and the best we can do it just keep trying to live our lives and change it for the better as best we can. So while this is by no means their most venomous album, it's the one that I feel most strongly about on a visceral level most of the time.
PROPAGANDHI 28 - TYPE O NEGATIVE 17
As I hinted in the Life is Killing Me entry, World Coming Down is without a doubt the bleakest album in TON's discography. Their signature brand of black humor is basically entirely washed away in a haze of drug-addled misery. It's a collection of agonizingly slow, nearly unlistenable drudging dirges that only give you enough breathing room to let out a sob and imagine your own death in horrific detail. The actual compositions on display are less important to me than the thematic cloak surrounding them. I've talked about this album in other features before, and I want to draw attention once again to Noktorn's review from 2007, which is, as far as I'm concerned, the definitive analysis of this album and TON's career as a whole. Forgive me for the cop-out of quoting an entire paragraph and basically letting Temporally Displaced Noktorn write this entry for me, but I'll never describe the feeling this album gives me better than he did thirteen years ago. "One of my central complaints about metal's illustrations of depression
and sadness is that they're much too idealistic and teenaged in tone.
Most metal bands have clearly never experienced genuine depression, as
it's not the gothic romance they portray it to be. The atonal moments of
Type O Negative capture the truth of it: depression is much more an
abstract, featureless misery than it is something beautiful. The riffs
flawlessly express this: amorphous, languishing collections of
lethargic, dissonant notes, with just a fragment of minor key melody to
give a trace of emotion to it And that's all there really should be, as
that's all there is during periods of depression: a trace of emotion,
more a memory of what it's like to feel than any feeling itself. But the
more incredible thing they're able to do is in the openly melodic
segments, with their bittersweet beauty that fits the New York goth
style and allows us all to look into it. This beauty isn't a celebration
of a depression, but a celebration of beauty in ugly places. It's the
beauty in natural disasters, in inevitability, and most importantly, in
the fact that you, yes, you, will not be remembered after you're gone.
Type O Negative celebrates our insignificance, how non-existent the
footprint each one of us leaves on our world will be. This is the
musical equivalent of standing on the edge of the river at night and
looking longingly at the city before you, surrounded by people, and yet
the loneliest person in the world. That is beauty." If that doesn't help World Coming Down make sense to you, then frankly, I wish my history of mental health more closely mirrored yours.
PROPAGANDHI 28 - TYPE O NEGATIVE 27
I wasn't a fan of Propagandhi in 2001 when this was released, mostly because at that time I refused to listen to anything that could be described as "punk", but god damn I can only imagine how much of a complete game changer this was for fans at the time. Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes is one of those rare albums that seems to be unambiguously recognized as a major band's magnum opus while simultaneously not going on to be super influential. Still to this day, Propagandhi is in a league of their own and TETA stands as one of the only albums that sounds like it does. I said Failed States is their heaviest album, but without a fucking doubt TETA is the most venomous. Absolutely zero punches are pulled with this one, from the scathing takedown of the punk scene in album highlight "Back to the Motor League" to the straight up animal-activist-terrorism-fantasy of "Purina Hall of Fame", to the feminist tirade in "Ladies Nite in Loserville", to the vicious condemnation of everybody who ignored the genocide in East Timor in "Mate Ka Moris Ukun Rasik An", it just never stops. The entire experience is like standing under a waterfall of flaming bile for a half hour, delivered with some of the most simultaneously smart and chaotic hardcore this side of Converge. It's like Less Talk, More Rock somehow still didn't manage to properly convey what the band was all about and so they threw every little bit of humor and fun out the window and instead just pummeled listeners over the head over and over and over again until everybody who stubbornly resisted the message finally fucked off forever. The CD contains an entire multimedia section detailing CIA war crimes, there's no subtlety here at all. I've mentioned bassist Todd Kowalski a few times throughout this feature, but this album heralded his entrance after John Sampson left to form The Weakerthans and god damn is it immediately obvious. Any poppy element of the band is now completely gone and Todd's razor sharp bark punctuates the fastest and meanest songs on the record like "Fuck the Border", "Bullshit Politicians", and "Ordinary People do Fucked-Up Things When Fucked-Up Things Become Ordinary". TETA feels like it's constantly flying off the rails while coming apart at the seams. Nothing is restrained, nothing is held back, it's just one of the most insane god damned records in the genre. Even "Purina Hall of Fame", the longest and most complex track on display, can't help itself with that climactic guitar solo sounding like Chris is completely losing control and taking the Kerry King approach, completely throwing out the entire concept of musicality and just raking his fingers to the bone, blood spraying everywhere while ten billion notes in no particular order just fly through the speakers and directly into your heart. There's really no place to put this, but that first heavy riff on "Purina Hall of Fame" is so fucking good that even Protest the Hero couldn't help but jack it for "Skies". "Better lives have been lived in the margins, locked in prisons, and lost to the gallows than have ever been enshrined in palaces".
PROPAGANDHI 39 - TYPE O NEGATIVE 27
If anybody reading this hasn't heard Type O Negative before for some reason, Bloody Kisses is without a doubt the first album you should check out. Not only is it their mainstream breakthrough and one of their best in general, it's also arguably their most diverse album. BK is a 73 minute smorgasbord of basically every single style they'd touched before and will touch in the future, and because of that it acts as the perfect primer for everything the band is about. You've got the old school punk blasts in "Kill All the White People" and "We Hate Everyone", you've got their goth rock groove in "Blood and Fire" and "Set Me on Fire", and most importantly you've got their signature goth/doom gloomfests in the title track, "Too Late: Frozen", "Christian Woman", and of course their most well known song, "Black no.1". That last track is in serious danger of being one of my favorite songs ever, across any genre. It's one of the most perfectly written tunes ever and I'll never not love it. The lyrics being a pointed skewering of goth girls wound up being deliciously ironic considering it's eventual goth anthem status. It's named after a hair dye, Josh plays the Addam's Family theme at one point, the line "Loving you was like loving the dead" is not a darkly romantic couplet but rather a joke about how you're terrible at sex, it's a brilliantly sardonic sendup of what would prove to be a key demographic, and I love that sort of deliberate self sabotage failceeding into massive success. I've mentioned several times that most TON albums are too long, despite their consistently high quality, and while that's true here as much as anywhere, this is still the most digestible of the lot. I think this is because the three albums after this all more or less stick to one mood whereas Bloody Kisses tries a whole bunch of different shit. They took a lot of risks on this one, and it paid off by launching the band into genuine superstardom in the 90s. There really was nobody else like them at the time and to this day there still kinda isn't. I've gotta cut this entry relatively short for reasons you'll see in a few words.
PROPAGANDHI 39 - TYPE O NEGATIVE 39
I was dreading this part of the list purely because I knew there was a very good chance I'd place Bloody Kisses and Dead Again right next to each other, and that makes them a bitch to write about because I love them both for basically the exact same reasons. Dead Again became the band's swansong, released a few years before Steele's death, and honestly I don't think I could've ever asked for a more fitting capstone on their career. If Bloody Kisses showcased all of the styles they were capable of, and the following three albums explored three of those different sounds to their fullest extent, Dead Again was the coda that reached back and acted as a "greatest hits" of all of them. This is probably their strangest album because it's so many contradictions simultaneously. It's their most diverse album while also being a throwback, it's the longest album despite having the fewest tracks and containing a multitude of uncharacteristically fast songs, it has the most uplifting and optimistic sound of them all while the subjects remain as dark and miserable as usual, it's a whole lot of everything and I love all of it. It's lyrically pretty confusing to me, because I've never really delved all that deeply into the band members' personal lives, but it seems like Peter had found religion at some point before writing this album, which might have something to do with why this album sounds oddly hopeful in many parts, but it does result in some weird anti-abortion shit punctuating the first verses in "These Three Things". That track ends up being the lone less-than-phenomenal moment on the album, though it's no fault of the lyrics, it's simply way too long and manages to be one of the few tracks in the band's oeuvre to fail to justify its length (I complain about their albums being too long but it's usually because they have too many tracks, not because the tracks themselves are too long). The other nine tracks though? Absolute knockout after knockout. Even their best albums fell prey to their tendency to throw in pointless interludes or joke tracks, but not this one. As great as TON's discography is, Dead Again is the only one I can confidently say is all killer and no filler. Apart from "These Three Things", there isn't one single thing I dislike about any tracks. Each one has a different angle of attack and all of them are phenomenal. I love how gorgeous "September Sun" is, I love the hardcore/crossover throwback moments in "Tripping a Blind Man" and "Some Stupid Tomorrow", I love the incredibly deep vocals and march cadence in "She Burned Me Down", I love the pure Sabbath riffing in "An Ode to Locksmiths", I love how the title track manages to be one of their fastest songs without actually sounding particularly angry, I love how oppressive and suffocating "The Profit of Doom" is, and god damn whatever "Halloween in Heaven" is is just fucking magical. The whole thing is Sabbath-cum-Bauhaus-cum-cumshot and there isn't a single thing I'd change about it. Dead Again may be an unorthodox choice, but it is without a doubt my favorite Type O Negative album and one of the greatest tragedies in music history is that Steele passed away before he was able to further expand upon it. "We ain't going home, we've got nowhere to go..."
PROPAGANDHI 39 - TYPE O NEGATIVE 52
Placing Supporting Caste at the top of the heap when discussing Propagandhi isn't really a hot take, but I do want to rewind a bit back to me placing Potemkin City Limits near the bottom. That's the album that usually fights with the surrounding albums for the top spot with most fans it seems. I mentioned the title track was on a different album and I felt that was fitting, and that's where this brick joke pays off, because "Potemkin City Limits", the track, not the album, is featured on Supporting Caste, and if Potemkin City Limits, the album, not the track, was fully realized and every song was as good as "A Speculative Fiction", it would've been Supporting Caste. This is their apex, and while the subsequent albums have been great, I don't think anything they do in the future has a reasonable chance of surpassing this monument. Everything they had been doing up to this point has just been so finely tuned and honed to perfection that there really isn't anything worth tweaking at this point. This was it, the absolute best version of Propagandhi to ever exist. I see the term "progressive thrash" thrown around a lot when people talk about the heavy sound they've championed since the turn of the millennium, but I think that's usually kind of off base and simply the result of punks not really having the language or intimate knowledge of metal to fully explain what it is they're doing, but not this time. Supporting Caste is the closest they ever came to truly being some form of whacked out left-field progressive thrash metal band without ever abandoning that melodic hardcore base. You can hear it plainly in tracks like "Night Letters", "Tertium Non Datur", and especially "Incalculable Effects". The A side in general tends to be the heavier side by a long shot, because even the though the two best songs on the album ("Dear Coach's Corner" and "Humane Meat") spend most of their time playing to their lighter and cleaner side, they feature the two heaviest moments on the album in the intro and bridge respectively. I mentioned before that Propagandhi's fearlessness in leaning into their acoustic sections and twinkly melodies is something that really helps them stand out, and the contrast between their heavy and light parts are their most stark here, and it works wonderfully. They were never the type of band to write in a straight line anyway, but this is the twistiest and most chaotic of them all. The poetic style of the lyrics works incredibly well with the way they write songs, seemingly jamming on riffs in odd orders and fitting the pieces in after the fact, but they do it all in such a way that you never doubt for one second that it wasn't intentional. I want to highlight "Dear Coach's Corner" as well for admittedly personal reasons y'all likely don't care about. I reference sports just as often as I reference videogames and Achewood in my writing, but in truth I haven't watched a sporting event in years at this point, and "Dear Coach's Corner" reaches directly into my heart to pull out the exact reasons why. It's such a heartfelt plea for sanity as we've watched this silly kid's game we all love turn into an expensive military recruitment commercial, and we've been robbed of the ability to even watch some dudes slap wads of rubber around a sheet of ice without being complicit in empire, and that's so fucking heartbreaking. Propagandhi sees the world for what it is, but they desperately, hopelessly wish that it wasn't this way, and they express this pain via some of the smartest punk ever written. I've mentioned before that my favorite band of all time is Bad Religion, but Bad Religion is what plays during the Democratic Party Convention while Propagandhi is what plays during the insurrection outside. The Hard Times put it best with their review: "We Listened to Half a Propagandhi Album and Came to While Setting a Wells Fargo on Fire"
PROPAGANDHI 53 - TYPE O NEGATIVE 52
AND SO! With the tight score of 53-52 we have a winner for the third Ladder Match, and they are...
Propagandhi! I know I said that it being October was the whole reason I wanted to do one of these featuring Type O Negative, but my insistence on keeping the two bands as different as possible meant that the decidedly unspooky band I chose wound up just edging them out. I'm being honest when I say that I don't tally up the point totals before I start writing (I scrapped a Metallica vs Suffocation matchup halfway through writing when I realized Suffo was gonna win by like forty points), and I also only make a rough outline of the final ordering and tweak it as I write and listen, it's not uncommon for albums to jump or fall from their initial position during the course of writing. Both of those things bit me this time, because I knew the top two were going to be Dead Again and Supporting Caste but I wasn't sure which order I'd put them in, and once I got to Bloody Kisses and realized the score was going to be tied at that point with one album each to remain, I audibly groaned because now that final ordering of the last two albums was going to be the most important placement. I joked that if Propagandhi won by a point you'd have to blame the last two tracks on Failed States, but in actuality you'll have to blame "These Three Things" for being too long because that was literally the deciding factor for me when it came to giving it #2 instead of #1. Really tough break for the Drab Four but they lost to some stiff competition.
Anyway, thank you all for reading! The spooktacular special wound up shafting the gothlords but life isn't fair and you'd think goths would've caught on to that by now.
(AUTHOR'S NOTE: While searching for pics to use for the awful matchup pics, I came to the conclusion that holy shit please buy Propagandhi's albums so Chris can afford a new Final Conflict shirt)
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