���Long before the likes of Wormed and Artificial Brain began to belch up their gurgling alien horrors, there was Demilich, the early '90s Finnish band who turned out some of the weirdest death metal of that era. Combining intricate dissonant melodies with an atmosphere that dripped with evil, crushing jagged riffage and offbeat time signatures, Demilich's convoluted and crushing death metal got pretty goddamn prog, and the band's bizarre and ridiculously verbose song titles like "The Sixteenth Six-Tooth Son Of Fourteen Four-Regional Dimensions (Still Unnamed)" and "Inherited Bowel Levitation � Reduced Without Any Effort" only added to the band's weird vibe. But the thing that really made death metal fans take notice was the insanely guttural toadlike corpse-burps of singer/guitarist Antti Boman, which were up to that point some of the most extreme vocalizations anyone had ever heard from a death metal band.

���From pretty early on, Demilich's music was flung far out into the left field of oddball death metal, but it was on the band's lone album Nespithe that the band perfected their strange sound, whipping through complex riffery and strange, discordant atmospherics in a way that can make some songs sound almost like a gore-metal King Crimson. Pretty essential stuff for fans of outre heaviness. Demilich's Nespinthe has gone in and out of print over the years, but now for the first time, the complete recorded works of this pioneering death metal outfit have been fully remastered and reissued as an extensive double disc set, which pairs the album with the band's assorted demos.

��� Disc one features the band's one and only full length album from 1993, Nespithe, a classic of bizarro death metal that still holds up today with its sheer weirdness and monstrously evil tone. As discordant as aspects of Demilich's songs can be, these eleven songs nonetheless batter you with some massive, angular death metal riffs, and slower grooving passages that are pretty pulverizing. Their churning progged-out death metal unfolds in bizarre, labyrinthine forms, with wild solos suddenly bursting out of the lopsided time signatures and deformed, reptilian riffage, the song structures quirky and unpredictable, emitting a barrage of squealing harmonics and pigpuke vocals, slipping from blasting angular mania into these monstrous twisted grooves on songs like "The Planet That Once Used To Absorb Flesh..." or the spiky off-time weirdness of "The Cry". This is a high point in 90' death metal, and one of my favorites alongside the likes of Gorguts and Nocturnus; it's certainly required listening for anyone into offbeat death metal. Nespinthe has certainly never sounded better than it does here, either; the new remastering really gives this the punch that it had been lacking on the previous releases, without diminishing the album's peculiar and distinctive mix.

��� The other disc features everything else that Demilich recorded, starting with three songs from the band's most recent recordings, the 2006 "Vanishing Sessions"; that stuff seems to head into a slightly more streamlined direction, but it's still pretty convoluted. An interesting look at what Demilich could have produced with a full-blown followup to Nespithe for sure, with jagged deathly dissonance and crushing counterpoint rhythms, mathy and proggy and possessed with that signature Demilich atmosphere of otherworldly horror, some of the riffs almost sounding like some twisted, demonic death metal version of Mastodon. There's the five tracks from the band's 1992 promo cassette The Echo, which includes early, rougher versions of several songs that would later appear on Nespithe; their ...Somewhere Inside The Bowels Of Endlessness... promo tape, also from 1992, which featured the use of atmospheric keyboard accoutrement while being even rawer yet; the 1991 The Four Instructive Tales ...Of Decomposition cassette tracks, which feature an earlier, more straightforward death metal style; and lastly, an early, 1991 rehearsal recording of "The Uncontrollable Regret Of The Rotting Flesh" that is about as low-fi and filthy as it gets.

���Again, this is a must-hear for anyone into left-field death metal, as the band's influence has crept over much of the death metal scene in the decades since this stuff first came out. The collection is nicely assembled with all new artwork, in an over-sized digipack with a forty-page booklet loaded with annotated lyrics, liner notes, photos, artwork, ads, and a lengthy interview with Demilich mastermind Antti Boman.