Type O Negative would be fine if they stopped trying to be funny. I respect them for not taking themselves too seriously and all, but it's really distracting when they fill their lyrics with schoolboy humour. From a "special" school. 'I Like Goils' is about a bloke desperately trying to prove how not gay he is. It isn't funny. 'Angry Inch' is about a sex-change operation gone wrong. Not funny. The title track goes along quite nicely until Pete Steele starts singing about his own faeces. No comment.

All of which is frustrating, because the music is actually quite good in a pop-goth background noise kinda way. Like everything else Type O have released, 'Life Is Killing Me' is a triumph of cod-gothic atmospherics over any particular substance. The guitars have become slightly choppier, but the keyboards still drone away in the background and Pete Steele still sounds like he's faking that deep, rich voice.

There's good stuff on here: single 'I Don't Wanna Be Me' doesn't overdo the "humour" angle and ends up being the catchy, light-hearted pop song Kerrang! TV is calling out for. 'Todd's Ship Gods' is a very listenable slab of gothic rock which bounces along on an '80s vibe; 'Anesthesia' has some lovely plinky piano bits which sound like Paradise Lost; '(We Were) Electrocute' somehow manages to evoke the spirit of Gary Numan without actually sounding much like him. It's all too repetitive though, and the rest merges into a thick, gooey mess.

So it's like any other Type O Negative album, really.