I know I'm not alone in coming late to Craw. While I dug the hell out of their final album that came out on Hydra Head back in 2002, I'd never spent much time with their previous work. This, despite the band being heralded by many in the know as one of the best outfits in the US underground throughout the 1990s. Once I finally did pick up those first three albums, though, I was sold. Starting with their eponymous 1993 debut, Craw established a sound both heavy and introspective, a kind of ragged math rock toughened with angular metallic guitars and uniquely haphazard songwriting. While the "math rock" thing was already going on by this time, Craw mutated that into something all their own, challenging and frantic, with unique vocals and a lyrical style heavily indebted to experimental literature and Burroughsian cut-ups. Sort of like their contemporaries in Starkweather, Oxbow and Season To Risk, Craw were sui generis, lumped under the noise rock and post-hardcore banner by undemanding rock critics, but reverberating with their own oblique, emotionally twisted frequency.

Craw's early discography has been out of print for years, but thanks to a handful of committed fans, all three of their 90s era albums have been reissued together in this single massive set. And there's no better time to discover the intelligent, abrasive music that this Cleveland band produced; if you're at all interested in math-metal and noise rock, Craw's music is a must-hear, a brilliant combination of progressive songwriting, improvisational electricity, and focused aggression that remains undiminished.

Had I heard the band's self-titled 1993 debut back when it came out, I think I would have been infatuated with it. Over the course of fifteen songs, Craw batter the listener with their combination of sludgy, metallic riffage, gloriously awkward time signatures, and eerily shadow-drenched melodies, fronted by the singer's often off-key mix of plaintive speak-sing lyrics and pained howls. Not hard to see how this might have left some listeners cold back in the early 90s, though. The somewhat incongruous vocals can feel somewhat out of place at times, though I've certainly grown to appreciate the presence of those nerve-wracked emotional outbursts with repeated listens. And the songs themselves frequently splinter into strange riff-detours, blasts of discordant amp-shriek and even some sudden shifts into free-jazz style improv. It's pretty challenging, even within the realm of "noise rock". But Craw were also undeniably ahead of their time. When you hear the lurching, bone-crunching skronk-metal of "Cobray To The North" and the brooding menace of "Slower", you can easily hear how this stuff would have had a strong influence on the mathy metallic hardcore that would emerge later in the decade. A powerful debut, filled with moments of ragged, howling beauty, the songs moving between haunting melody and devastating, majestic riffs.

They followed that auspicious debut with 1994's Lost Nation Road, an album that felt even more unhinged. The sheer metallic weight of the debut is tempered here with a slightly more textured guitar sound, but if anything the music becomes even more abrasive, thanks to the twitchiness of the rhythm section and the discordant, almost jazz-like guitar chords that scrape across these ten tracks. Fans of the debut's crushing heaviosity won't be disappointed , as there's plenty of metallic crunch. Songs like "Strongest Human Bond" deliver tough, anthemic noise rock, an easier sound to grok compared to their moments of freaked-out jazzy carnage. A smoldering malevolence materializes beneath the angular sludge and sheets of atonal guitar noise, fully coming into view with moments like the nightmarish finale of "Lifelike". There's also some screeching free-jazz style saxophone unleashed on a couple of tracks, like the tangled, blitzkrieg chaos of "Botulism, Cholera + Tarik". So it's still as challenging as before, but more focused and more fearsome. There's a lot here to catch the ear of adventurous noise rock fans: vicious riffage wrapped in barbed-wire, the formal experimentation, the raw emotion seeping from those frantic vocals. But there's also a poetic blackness to these songs that distinguished the music from anything else at the time.

Craw's final salvo for the decade is 1997's Map, Monitor, Surge, a jazzier, creepier monstrosity, still unmistakably Craw, but the band seemed to be working with a more expansive soundfield this time around, surrounding their trademark jagged riffs and seething, emotionally wrought heaviness. Such great stuff on this record, from the pummeling progginess of opener "Treading Out The Winepress" and its sudden segues into shadowy minimalism; the hardcore-tainted skronk of "Unsolicited, Unsavory" and its diversions into sinister, lurching anti-funk; "I Disagree (And Here's Why)"'s writhing, careening hooks and spidery riffage; the spiraling helix of violence that ascends throughout "Rip And Read"; the culmination of this frustration and fire found in the epic twelve minute closer "Days In The Gutter/Nights In The Gutter", a ferocious chugfest that delves into long stretches of scattershot textural improvisation and comes out on the other end whole and snarling, building into one of the band's most cathartic and crushing climaxes. I could gush forever about this album, which I believe has become my favorite of all of the Craw LPs. Those vocals are more intense than ever, spitting out that fractured, off-kilter narrative that's fueled the band's lyrics from the beginning. And the quieter moments on Surge virtually forecast the whole "post rock" thing by at least a couple of years; here it's not yet codified, just another shading to Craw's twisted, metallic avant-rock. And like the previous album, their strange counterintuitive songwriting and angular harshness belied increasingly melodic and accessible songwriting, and there are plenty of moments on this album that I could easily imagine fans of anything from Tool to King Crimson to Neurosis getting into. Even three albums in, Craw still sounded totally ahead of their time.

This monumental collection has been issued as both a triple CD set in digipak packaging, and a massive vinyl boxset. That boxset might win for the most impressive box I've seen from last year: beautifully designed by the folks at Aqualamb, this casewrapped box includes the band's first three albums as double LPs, each in their own jacket, as well as a two-hundred page, perfect-bound book overflowing with an extensive, in-depth history of the band with new interviews with all of the members, a wealth of rare and previously unpublished photos, assorted flyer art and other visual ephemera from their career, a detailed timeline of all of the band's activities and touring, and much, much more, all rigorously researched and documented.