Entry 1465 - Type O Negative - October Rust

Style: gothic metal

Primary Emotions/Themes: Romance, lust, death, life, fall, the beauty of nature

Thoughts: This is gonna be a tough one to tackle. I remember going into a local supermarket decades ago and picking this up along with a couple of Pantera CD's. I had no idea what on earth it was, but it was on Roadrunner Records and that was a good thing.

Well I put on the CD and I was greeted with... static. This was their music? What's going on here. Before I knew it the band was laughing at me with their practical joke. After a brief introduction they then started the album proper... and this is when my taste in music was immutably changed.

Gothic music was not something that I new of. I had been into brutal bands, I had been into atmospheric bands... but not like this. I had never heard music that was so beautifully depressed, so horrifically uplifting, so incredibly downtrodden. 

That was nearly thirty years ago... a literal lifetime ago. I am now nearly three times that age, and yet this album remains in my collection. Why?

I've never heard an album like this. Either pre-October Rust or post-October Rust... this is utterly unique. Even within the whole Type O Negative discography. Sure there are moments where they revisit the brilliance of this album, but never again would the band be so focused on this utterly crushing depressive beauty.

The album weeps. The guitar riffs channel the souls of loved ones lost. The drums accent the beat of a dying heart. The keyboards lay a finality over the music like a closing coffin. The vocals are the mournful string that tie it all together. October Rust is a celebration of death, life, sex, and all things that are human. It is a standing monument to what it means to be mortal and partake in the pleasures of life... only for those pleasures to ultimately end.

Outside of the first two tracks the typical tongue in cheek humor that the band has in so many of their songs is completely absent on the record. The music is uniformly slow or mid paced, no punk influence can be heard on any of the tracks. It's as if the band fully accepted that this was their sound in 1996 and just went with it. The result is a gothic metal masterpiece... something that the genre would never get to again.

I feel like I either have to end this reflection here or I'll go on for another few thousand words. Simply put October Rust is one of the best representations of gothic metal, and potentially metal as a whole. The sound is commercially accessible however still channels the core tenants of the genre it helped create. A once in a life time album.