I know many roll their eyes when faced with another Earache reissue, but hold on one sec: if you don't have all five Carcass albums, you might want to consider this set of reissues (available individually and, if you act fast, you can get a box to house them in). While there does seem to be a rushed air to the things (slight inconsistencies in layout, not a huge amount of extras as far as liner notes, etc.), there's still enough bonus material to keep us interested. And the packaging is pretty nice, with each album in a cool deluxe digipak gatefold dealie. There's a lot of material to cover here, as all five of the band's studio albums have been reissued, so, real quick:
Reek Of Putrefaction (originally released in '88) is still an ugly mother of a record, one responsible for a whole offspring of gore-grind imitators. It's tough to listen to, but in the best of ways. The disc also includes the even more lo-fi Flesh Ripping Sonic Torment demo, featuring Sanjiv on vocals, who never made it to a studio album. Not that you can tell the difference, really. Each of the discs comes with a DVD featuring a 30-minute documentary with the band looking back at that era. This one talks about the start of the band and the naivety of it all, which is pretty amazing because when I first heard this first album, I assumed these guys were pro musicians, weirdo adults from England doing really fucked-up stuff. Only a bit of that was true; they were young and clueless, forging a new genre without realizing it.
Symphonies Of Sickness is an interesting transition album (as, really, all Carcass albums were). When I was younger I found it to be too similar to the first, but time shows it to be surprisingly sophisticated; who knew the songs were so long and well-composed? Great stuff, and like all Carcass discs except the last practically formed a new sub-sub-genre of metal. This reissue comes with the Symphonies Of Sickness demo, which, like most demos, is kinda interesting from an academic standpoint, but who listens to this stuff more than once? It should be said that the DVDs may be a bit dull for all but the most serious fans, with regurgitated live/video clips mixed in with the poor-quality interviews (some with background noise competing with the members' talking), but they are interesting for us Carcass lifers; here the band talks about their progression into longer songs and a better studio.
1991's Necroticism: Descanting The Insalubrious is probably still my personal fave (not my spellchecker's, though). Sure, the band coulda used the edit button on a couple of these songs (which they did for their next splatter, with mixed results), but this is about as perfect as gore-grind ever got, with memorable songs mixed with extreme guttural blasting and grinding. This just never gets old; I'll be in the old folks' home cranking this shit. The bonus material is the amazing, unforgettable Tools Of The Trade EP, a 10/10 EP if ever there was one. DVD? More of the same, this time touching on the introduction of Mike Amott on second guitar.
Heartwork (originally from 1993) is a masterwork of balance: classy song-writing with extreme metal chops and vocals; this one got more than a few raised eyebrows in my death metal circles at the time, but most metalheads have come around to admitting just how great this is. Some of these songs have been stuck in my head for years; interestingly, despite this being a major-label release and by far the band's most mature yet, in the DVD they talk about how no one really liked it at the time (too extreme for the mainstream, too mainstream for the extreme). They also talk about Amott's departure and the two guitarists who came after him. There is so much bonus material on this one it's on a separate disc: the complete album as a demo. Does it sound much different to the average listener? Nah, but to the gore obsessed, this is a treat.
The band's last, '93's Swansong, didn't so much divide fans as it did bore them and, subsequently, people barely even talked about the damn thing. It's Carcass' boogie-rock disc, and although it is still pretty damn heavy (and features 'Keep On Rotting In The Free World', one of the band's best songs), it was marked by turmoil within the band or, more like it, indifference, as they discuss on the DVD, where drummer Ken Owen also talks about his chilling brain haemorrhage and nine-month coma and indeed proved to be their last. Definitely their weakest, it was a shame to see them go out with this disc.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and give this whole collection one rating, and a damn high one at that, because it's a concise legacy from a band that even though reunion tours are occurring seem intent on not ruining it. And as much as I would drool over a new disc, you know what? Let's just leave it at this.
