Still Looking for Someone Who Was Around

As we approach the one year anniversary of his death, MetalUnderground reports that it will be releasing a Peter Steele tribute album. According to the site:

"To honor Peter’s memory on the anniversary of his passing, and lead a new generation of metalheads to his music, heavy metal news site Metalunderground.com has teamed up with a dozen underground bands from across the globe to release an exclusive tribute album. The tribute, entitled “All For None, None For All: A Tribute to Peter Steele," was done in collaboration with Dan Mitchell of Beneath The Woods Studio and features twelve stellar cover songs from many stages of Peter’s career in both Type O Negative and Carnivore."

I've posted quite a bit here about my admiration for Steele's music. If you could get past all of the dumb-guy-from-Brooklyn humor, the sex god nonsense and the very pre-Twilight-era vampire fetishism, I was always convinced that there was a ridiculously talented songwriter within the guy.

And, as I have written elsewhere on this blog, tracks like "Love You To Death" and "Haunted" have always seemed so beautiful to me that they almost didn't count as metal (a feeling I first experienced the first time I ever heard the middle section of "Orion" -- or, much more to the point now that I think of it, the intro to "Damage, Inc." -- as a young teenager....and that's some excellent songwriting company).

But all of that said, I'm always a little wary of tribute albums. I own a lot of them, and they're often just shy of worthless. The exceptions tend to be when the interpretations show some real ambition. And in order to inspire that, it generally helps if the source materials has a depth of arrangement to it.

So, that's why I'm relatively eager to give this one a try. If Steele and Josh Silver could do one thing, it was typically to put a worthwhile arrangement on a song. Plus, the one cover I've ever heard of them (via Boston shoegazers, The Constants) was generally very satisfying.

So, check it out. I have to admit that I don't know a single band on this list, and that's a good thing. I'm kind of looking forward to this.