Earache has given a pair of early Anaal Nathrakh releases the reissue-bundle treatment that they've bestowed upon more and more of their back catalog, giving extreme metal fans an opportunity to beef up their collection with nicely boxed dual Cd sets of material that, in most cases, had gone out of print for a while. Taking their 2001 debut album The Codex Necro and it's follow-up/companion Ep When Fire Rains Down From The Sky... from 2002, the label here presents a reissue set of this UK black metal band's earliest releases that will fully school any newcomer to the vicious, advanced 21st century industrial-necro violence of members V.I.T.R.I.O.L. and Irrumator, complete with the bonus tracks that were included with the original Earache reissues. The entire Anaal Nathrakh catalog is incredible, and even this early in their existence, the band was creating some of the most nihilistic, bestial black metal I've ever heard.

When The Codex Necro originally came out in 2001, the album received rabid accolades from the European metal press and appeared on numerous year end best-of lists. And rightfully so; here was a band that combined the blazing, frostbitten ferocity of classic second wave black metal with a futuristic industrial sheen, but instead of delving into the sort of warped dancefloor tactics that other electronically-enhanced BM outfits were experimenting with around the turn of the decade, Anaal Nathrakh forged this sound into something so hateful and apocalyptic that the album threatens to blowtorch the flesh right off of your face. Crushing black blast fused with a bizarre electronic edge, with some truly insane production techniques that were unlike anything I'd heard at the time. The seminal BM of bands like Mayhem and Darkthrone is obviously at the root of their sound, but it's mutated and spliced into something even faster and meaner. A heavy death metal influence finds it's way into Anaal Nathrakh's sound, making this so much heavier than most black metal, but the band also weaves in bizarre melodic touches, insane mechanized drum patterns, irradiated electronic ambience, perverted Gregorian chants, weird wah-stained riffs, even veering unexpectedly into some frantic drum 'n' bass breaks on "Paradigm Shift - Annihilation". Then there are the vocals, extreme and processed screams, maniacal high-pitched falsetto shrieks that sound like a cybernetic Rob Halford, and insane, bestial grunts, the vocals constantly changing shape, giving the music a constant psychotic energy, an incomprehensible gnashing of teeth. An amazing debut that left a permanent boot mark on the face of British black metal. The album originally came out in the UK on the Mordgrimm label, but in 2005 Earache released it in the US with four bonus tracks that were taken from Anaal Nathrakh's Peel Session from 2003, which included members of Napalm Death and Cradle Of Filth as auxilliary members...

Released as a follow up to Codex, the 2003 Ep When Fire Rains Down From The Sky, Mankind Will Reap As It Has Sown delivers a half hour assault of maniacal necro violence from British black metaller Anaal Nathrakh. A vicious six-song exercise in apocalyptic blast hate from the duo of Irrumator and V.I.T.R.I.O.L., with much of the bizarre production fuckery and electronic enhancement that made their debut so wickedly alien sounding now stripped away for a more straightforward, grind black/death attack. You won't find any of the sudden junglist outbreaks, electronically processed vocals, bizarre ambience or industrial clatter, but they still keep their sound in total end time overdrive, blasting out hyper fast, violent black metal scorched in nuclear fire and etched in misanthropic hatred. The sound is still pretty fractured and insane, the blastbeats hurtling into the stratosphere, the arrangements full of jagged stops and frenzied riffage, and of course, those psychotic vocals, a hellish tapestry of tortured screaming, bestial grunting, and wailing cries that feel as though they are emanating from the bowels of an asylum, with some additional throat damage contributed by Attila Csihar (Sunn O))) / Mayhem / Aborym). Like the debut, this was released in the UK on Mordgrimm, but was later reissued for the US by Earache with three bonus tracks taken from Anaal Nathrakh's 2005 BBC Rock Show appearance.

Both discs are packaged together in a full color box.