Review by Felix on July 9, 2019.

Sometimes I think that everything was better in the old days, but this is nostalgic nonsense. Even the golden eighties were full of catastrophes. Chernobyl, the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, earthquakes in Iran... the list is endless - and some cynics say that the list is not complete without the release of Break the Silence. Quite frankly, I agree.

Executioner's vinyl is the grotesque caricature of a metal album. The song-writing is as terrible as a plane crash. The production sounds thin, atypically holey and miserable. I do not know the motivation behind the recordings, but I am almost sure the "musicians" wanted to make an attempt on the global metal scene. They tried to poison our tastes with this meaningless, uninspired and totally useless track. I do not intend to destroy the reputation of my most favourite sub-genre, that's the reason why I do not write every letter of the word thr**h. It would be terrible to read such a fantastic word in a review for this pile of shit, because there exists absolutely no link between the here presented songs and the classics you are thinking about when it comes to thr**h. However, Executioner wanted to be a thr**h band, but they were just crummy wannabes. Usually, dudes of this kind do not even get the permission to be part of the road crew. Here are the painful details.

The choruses are absolute crap. No tinge of a melody, no memorable lines, nothing. I admit that "Your Life Is Over" sounds a little bit better than the other flops, but even this track does not reach a fairly good level. Okay, I further admit that the solos are really solos. What I mean is that they have nothing to do with the rest of the so-called songs. They are performed without any connections to the other parts. However, the worst is yet to come. Sometimes the "artists" want to show that they can play really fast. That's the point where the drummer decides to torture his snare drum as much as he can. It's that kind of velocity which is performed only for the sake of velocity. By the way, the rattling snare is one reason why the mix sucks. The guitars also fail, they are neither heavy nor massive. Believe me, it's a drama and the totally expressionless vocals do not add any value to the songs as well. But the main problem, no doubt about it, are the songs themselves. They are performed without any emotions, they do not possess any kind of surprising twists and turns and to call them simple is almost a euphemism. The meticulous design of the fabulous artwork reflects the accurate elaboration of the ten anti-songs. I never worshipped the God of complexity, but rather straight tunes need at least a good main riff. Too bad that Executioner ignore this iron law completely.

With publications like this one, New Renaissance Records demonstrated impressively that they were interested in committing commercial suicide. Crude gangs like Executioner deserved a kick in the ass, a glass of warm milk or some private lessons, but there is one thing that they broke the silence for the last time. It remained their farewell album. Hey dudes, do me a favor and did not deserve: a record deal. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Break the Silence do not come back. No renaissance instead of New Renaissance. We do not want to face the next catastrophe.

Rating: 0.3 out of 10

Review by Sam on May 13, 2026.

I remember reading an interview with Peter Steele around the time 'Life Is Killing Me' came out. When asked to describe the sound of his band’s latest effort, Pete said, “It’s like Pink Floyd meets Black Sabbath. I call it Stink Floyd.” Ever equipped with witty one-liners, Petrus Thomas Ratajczyk slayed journalists with his sardonic sense of humor throughout his three-decade career as bassist and frontman for Fallout, Carnivore, and Type O Negative. And indeed, Type O’s penchant for The Floyd is apparent even in the opening moments of Dead Again’s first and title track as it plays similarly to 'In The Flesh'?, though considerably heavied up.

Do you like d-beats? Do you like dirgy, depressive doom? Do you like gang vocals? Do you like to have a good time, all the time? If the answer is yes to any or all of those queries, Dead Again is the Type O Negative album for you. Life Is Killing Me is generally considered a wild card for listeners new to the succinctly nicknamed Drab Four, and World Coming Down is thought to be for fans only. So the Bensonhoist Lesbian Choir bounced back glowingly from those two previous outings. (I, for one, as a lifelong fan, am of the opinion that they never released an album that did not kick ass.) Dead Again is permeated with such exuberance and immediacy that, although it’s Type O’s final recording, I would deem it a perfectly suitable starting point if you are not already familiar with Peter, Johnny, Kenny, and Josh.

The record’s first two offerings, which are the title track followed by the awesome Tripping a Blind Man, are both epic in nature, with some of the most punishing doom they had ever recorded. If doom’s not your thing, fear not, because the bulk of these two pieces dwell in the land of d-beat debauchery. As the title song races to a close, Peter’s call and response of “I can’t believe I died last night!” with the band’s retort of “whoa whoa wh-whoa whoa WHOOOAAA” never fails to put a smile on my face. They were all in their mid-forties at the time this was recorded, but I’ll wager they were having a lot more fun than they were during the sessions for certified gold record Bloody Kisses. If ever there was a mode of expression for conveying feelings of mirth and revelry, it’s the Discharge beat, which is in no short supply across Dead Again’s first couple of songs. Not only that, but the prominence of the d-beat here reaffirms the faith in the crossover days of Carnivore.

The Profit of Doom. This menacing, hulking, megalithic work of sheer genius may be the best thing the Four Dicks from Brooklyn ever did. If you like the opening salvo of Black Sabbath’s Into the Void, imagine that riff folded over itself on a combination of xanax and acid with the gain turned all the way up and the guitar tuning tuned all the way down. Kenny masterfully walks up the fretboard from the open low note all the way to the high E string with a riff that conjures not only the great Iommi but also the eldritch gods of Lovecraft and his Weird Tales. Peter’s lamentation of “Goodbye cruel world!” and the bands’ synchronized chanting of “oooh” and “ahhh” on two and four contribute to the otherworldliness of this gargantuan brute. If you manage to survive the utter devastation of these first couple of minutes, look out, because here comes the stone called Apophis, which brings apocalypse. April two oh two nine. The Final Time. The Profit of Doom was the album’s first single, clocking in at 10:48. I’ve never heard the radio edit, and I don’t want to because I don’t like to hear perfection ruined.

The second single is September Sun and it has a run time of just one minute less than The Prophet. I pray to satan that there is no radio edit version of this track because it also deserves masterpiece status. Type O really knew how to hit you in the feels with their lyrical brilliance, and September Sun is beyond just a poignant reminder of this fact. “A lost man in time, was his name Peter?” screams Kenny in his signature wailing vocal style. The riffing technique of this piece, along with Tripping a Blind Man, is some of Kenny’s finest work. Both songs utilize a low root note, which is then complemented by a laser beam sustained higher note on two.

Halloween in Heaven continues the glee as a feel-good ode to rock ' n ' roll luminaries who died young, only to inspire future generations. It includes vocal accompaniment by one Tara von Flowers, and you can tell by her voice that she’s smokin' hot. After this brief dalliance in nostalgia, the tone gets quite serious with These Three Things. The dismal, despondent opening sequence, which is revisited about midway, will crush your fucking balls. Was Peter catholic? Was he a born-again Christian? Did he spend his life mostly as a doomed droog addict, who briefly got sober during the conception of this work? Did he maybe finance an abortion in his younger days, and write this song as a cry for forgiveness? I just don’t know, but the subject matter of These Three Things has been the cause for much consternation among Type O’s loyal fan base. Consider:

At the end, I'll escort you to hell
The dark one's forces
Lock your flaming cell
To murder the once unborn
The worst sin you've ever performed

We may never know just what soap box Mr. Steele was standing on for this one, but the music is so good, I don’t think it matters. The riff that corresponds with the lyric “Of a land that shuns the sun” is so powerfully driving that it is transcendent, rendering things like space and time down to mere figments of our collective unconscious. I am the dual of the fisherman Simon. Dude, what??

I am now going to combine the record’s final few tracks, hopefully into one paragraph, because I don’t want to be guilty of the cardinal sin of reviewing something sequentially. Some Stupid Tomorrow is the most memorable of the bunch with its thrashing rage. I O I! In on it! Never forget. An Ode to Locksmiths is an acknowledgment of the raw deal given to women ever since that business between Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Closing piece, Hail and Farewell to Britain, could be about anything, but it seems to deal in some sort of disillusionment with the English. Perhaps the guys had an encounter with one of their heroes from the UK that left a bad taste in their mouths. I will say this: the stunning riff that accompanies the lyric “I can’t believe how cruel life is” is one of the heaviest moments to be had throughout the one hour and seventeen minutes of Dead Again. Type O Negative leaves us with the maniacal hollering of Peter over the din of battle, airplanes and tanks crashing amid machine gun fire, and it’s fucking overwhelming. In just three short years after unveiling this towering work of art, Peter Steele - The Green Man, The Thermonuclear Warrior, The Prophet of Doom - would be dead at the age of forty-eight.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Review by Tomek on April 12, 2007.

Introduction really isn't needed here since Type O Negative is a band that everybody knows, heard their music or their name, and either loves what they do or hates their guts. "Dead Again" is their seventh record and here are some of my thoughts about it.

Musically, album-as a whole - is a pure and unquestioned proof that Type O Negative is a solid band and not just a few excellent musicians playing together. In every single song on the album, there is a place for someone to shine, no one is omitted or moved to the back. Every song sounds different, all are packed with excellent riffs, original and interesting bass lines, dark and monumental synths, remarkable drumming, and what I believe to be the best vocal performance from Steele so far. Despair and complexity, heaviness and melody, love and hate, ugliness and beauty - together become a powerful combination. Whole album is full of revived energy and you can hear all the best musical ideas known from previous albums which Type O Negative has been working from the beginning. All these elements make recommending any song in particular extremely hard because all of them are outstanding in their own way.
Production and mixing are both stellar, as you can expect from giants of American doom/goth Metal. The one and only thing I find unsatisfying is the fact that all of the things mentioned before are something that we've come to expect and recognize Type O Negative by. All previous albums had those elements, and there is not one new thing that could surprise a fan of band.

"Dead Again" is a good album, but I could use some fresh ideas from those guys. I was hoping for something more, but I guess the good ol' Type-O will have to suffice.

Categorical Rating Breakdown

Musicianship: 9
Atmosphere: 7
Production: 8
Originality: 7
Overall: 7

Rating: 7.6 out of 10

Review by Felix on July 9, 2019.

Sometimes I think that everything was better in the old days, but this is nostalgic nonsense. Even the golden eighties were full of catastrophes. Chernobyl, the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, earthquakes in Iran... the list is endless - and some cynics say that the list is not complete without the release of Break the Silence. Quite frankly, I agree.

Executioner's vinyl is the grotesque caricature of a metal album. The song-writing is as terrible as a plane crash. The production sounds thin, atypically holey and miserable. I do not know the motivation behind the recordings, but I am almost sure the "musicians" wanted to make an attempt on the global metal scene. They tried to poison our tastes with this meaningless, uninspired and totally useless track. I do not intend to destroy the reputation of my most favourite sub-genre, that's the reason why I do not write every letter of the word thr**h. It would be terrible to read such a fantastic word in a review for this pile of shit, because there exists absolutely no link between the here presented songs and the classics you are thinking about when it comes to thr**h. However, Executioner wanted to be a thr**h band, but they were just crummy wannabes. Usually, dudes of this kind do not even get the permission to be part of the road crew. Here are the painful details.

The choruses are absolute crap. No tinge of a melody, no memorable lines, nothing. I admit that "Your Life Is Over" sounds a little bit better than the other flops, but even this track does not reach a fairly good level. Okay, I further admit that the solos are really solos. What I mean is that they have nothing to do with the rest of the so-called songs. They are performed without any connections to the other parts. However, the worst is yet to come. Sometimes the "artists" want to show that they can play really fast. That's the point where the drummer decides to torture his snare drum as much as he can. It's that kind of velocity which is performed only for the sake of velocity. By the way, the rattling snare is one reason why the mix sucks. The guitars also fail, they are neither heavy nor massive. Believe me, it's a drama and the totally expressionless vocals do not add any value to the songs as well. But the main problem, no doubt about it, are the songs themselves. They are performed without any emotions, they do not possess any kind of surprising twists and turns and to call them simple is almost a euphemism. The meticulous design of the fabulous artwork reflects the accurate elaboration of the ten anti-songs. I never worshipped the God of complexity, but rather straight tunes need at least a good main riff. Too bad that Executioner ignore this iron law completely.

With publications like this one, New Renaissance Records demonstrated impressively that they were interested in committing commercial suicide. Crude gangs like Executioner deserved a kick in the ass, a glass of warm milk or some private lessons, but there is one thing that they broke the silence for the last time. It remained their farewell album. Hey dudes, do me a favor and did not deserve: a record deal. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Break the Silence do not come back. No renaissance instead of New Renaissance. We do not want to face the next catastrophe.

Rating: 0.3 out of 10