Cost: 50¢
This was an extremely lucky find in a blind bag sale from a closing distro, where I bought 100 mystery CDs for $50. I was a little shocked at the relative rarity of this compared to everything else, and it was one of the discs that interested me the most musically, since around 80% of the haul was modern black metal and goregrind.
There are covers of Slayer, Blitzkrieg, Asphyx, Death, Motley Crue, S.O.D., Destruction, Black Sabbath, Hallows Eve, Metallica, Nirvana, and Diamond Head. I'm not going to waste time with a track-by-track, since the cover quality is consistently decent across the board. Other than some overly altered/improvised guitar solos, the only issue I have is every single song is performed with fairly monotonous death metal vocals, so there's much less sound variety than you'd expect from such a wide array of covers. Ironically, you'd expect the vocals to be weakest on the songs that originally had cleaner vocal styles, but I thought they stood out as most lacking on the cover of Asphyx's "The Rack," since they just come off as ultra-generic compared to Martin van Drunen.
Even with the severe shortage of Hallows Eve covers in the world, the best renditions are Destruction's "The Antichrist" and Death's "Forgotten Past." The Death song and the cover of "Postmortem" by Slayer are closest musically to Neurosis' own death/thrash sound, so they're the two renditions that feel most natural stylistically. The CD closes out with a new original song and outro track, which are fine, but I'd much rather listen to the Verdun 1916 album or even the earlier demo.
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