The Best of Type O Negative

Album Review

Well-chosen with just enough missing that you'll have to travel further, Roadrunner's 2006 compilation The Best of Type O Negative represents the tongue-in-cheek (or are they??) sleaze goth metal juggernaut quite well. There's a healthy dose of their mammoth sludge side (the naughty "My Girlfriend's Girlfriend," the absolutely epic "Unsuccessfully Coping with the Natural Beauty of Infidelity"), a taste of their biting nihilistic side (the very Sisters of Mercy "Black No. 1," the surging "Everyone I Love Is Dead"), plus a couple of the absurd covers the band is famous for. Here it's their drugged-out take on Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl" and their over the top thrash through Deep Purple's "Highway Star," but you really haven't lived until you've heard them turn Seals & Crofts' "Summer Breeze" into a crushing dirge, and since that ain't here, this ain't your one stop shop. Lead singer/Svengali Pete Steele had been in the news as this was released because he made the "what the?" announcement that he was going to join the cast of the reality program The Surreal Life, and the release is also part of a Roadrunner "best-of" series, but this isn't a hastily tossed-off compilation. The tracks are sequenced well and with the band's only other comp — 2001's The Least Worst of Type O Negative — heavy with remixes and alternate versions, this is the easiest entry point into their sinister and strange world.