When discussing Type O Negative’s major releases I often forget that The Origin of the Feces even exists. That’s not because it’s bad – far from it, the material here is amazing – but this is the one major release they have where no new ideas are introduced and no progression of any sort is made, to the extent that I don’t even consider this a main studio album despite this being a collection of studio material. It’s more of a foot note in their discography than anything else, and it doesn’t mean a whole lot when divorced from Slow, Deep and Hard and by extension the two Carnivore albums. If it does represent anything, it’s possibly the greatest example of TON’s sense of humour across their entire discography, as this release is literally one giant joke.

The Origin of the Feces is for the most part re-treads of various tracks from Slow, Deep and Hard. ‘I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else’ is ‘Unsuccessfully Coping…’, ‘Gravity’ is ‘Gravitational Constant…’, ‘Kill You Tonight’ is ‘Xero Tolerance’ and ‘Pain’ is ‘Prelude to Agony’, which is about 36 minutes of this 51 minute tracklist. These songs are abrupt collisions of goth/doom and crossover/thrash that bring excellent riffs, keyboard lines and a bitter, ugly attitude courtesy of Pete’s amazing vocals, which range from a hardcore-tinged shout to more conventional singing to go with the more melodic strains of the music. While this material is of quality, this is pretty much the main reason this is their weakest release; though there are differences between the originals and these versions the basic musical foundation here is a straight up rehash of their debut, with no substantial musical progression or new material being presented, merely alternate takes on songs listeners have heard before.

There are differences, of course – these certainly sound more like live performances despite not being live. The sound of the music is as if they were playing in a large room of some sort, with more reverb and space in the sound. The performances differ too, with the riffs and keyboards perhaps having a slightly different sense of melody or the drumming being slightly different in its timing. The vocals are particularly different – Pete often delivers lyrics slightly off the mark or at a different pitch, if he even delivers them at all. The songs are often truncated too, with ‘Kill You Tonight’ being played here as both a two minute track and a 7 minute reprise and ‘Pain’ being a bit under 5 minutes in length. The most notable difference however is the crowd noise found throughout the songs, consisting of fans jeering and booing in a studio to be recorded and added to the songs. Honestly, the back and forth between the verbal abuse of the crowd and Pete is one of the only aspects of this release that truly makes it worthwhile; it’s actually goddamn hilarious. Highlights include when ‘Gravity’ is interrupted due to a supposed bomb threat targeting the venue, the very opening moments which is just the crowd chanting ‘You suck!’ and when the band gets bottled by one of the crowd, but honestly it’s all just one giant laugh.

Beyond the humour, the only other main draw here is the various tracks that are exclusive to this release. ‘Hey Pete’ is a reworking of ‘Hey Joe’ and it’s about as good as a cover could turn out; the band do a great job of making the song their own, turning it from a laid back psychedelic track into a gloomy doom metal number with lyrics to fit Slow, Deep and Hard‘s concept of murdering your ex over infidelity. The reissue features a cover of ‘Paranoid’ (one which lacks much of the faux-live trappings of the rest of the songs here) – the band pull a similar trick here by turning this speedy rocker into a 7 minute morose and downtrodden doom metal song and it goes over amazingly. It beats out most of their material up to this point and is perhaps a precursor to their more overtly doom metal-influenced albums down the road. The sole new original song here is ‘Are You Afraid’, which is a little over two minutes of goth rock, containing the sort of lush keyboard work, gentle bass-baritone crooning mixing with agonised screaming and tender atmosphere that would come to define TON’s later, more famous albums. Critically, all of these new tracks show the band going in a more pure goth/doom direction and as such they are the only times they really undergo any progression from their debut; it’s a shame that they make up less than a third of the runtime.

As if the original cover of Pete’s hairy anus wasn’t enough of an indicator, this is obviously not meant to be seen as a serious work from the band at all and indeed it isn’t for the most part, being a rehash of their old songs for a joke. This does have some value for the sheer humour on offer and the few new tracks here are certainly interesting, but otherwise this is one of the only non-essential and unnecessary releases in their catalogue. It’s fun for sure but most of these songs were done better a year prior, and honestly this makes far more sense as an addendum to their debut than as a standalone release. All this said however, it is quite a testament to the quality of TON’s music and sense of humour that they can just play their old songs more sloppily on a new release while getting fans to tell the listener that the band suck and still have it turn out better than most artists could even dream of.

Slow, Deep and Hard is an odd place for Type O Negative to start out, as it’s honestly not a whole lot like what would end up putting the band on the map. Rather, this listens more like the last Carnivore album – while there are certainly elements to the music here that weren’t present in Carnivore’s music (ones that would end up on Bloody Kisses) this still has a lot of influence from those old albums and the feel of it is certainly much more in line with them too. It isn’t so much a bridge between the two bands as even with these extra influences its closer to Carnivore than anything TON would put out, but in retrospect the indication of a new direction is certainly there.

Of the 6 actual compositions here, 5 of them are towering, mighty epics with multiple distinct sections to them. The simplest way to describe them are lengthy feedback-inflected doom metal numbers with thrash metal/crossover sections spliced in, along with strong goth overtones due to the presence of keyboards and more melodic riffing. Thrash was obviously the backbone of Carnivore’s sound, doom metal isn’t a foreign influence (several tracks across their catalogue played around with it) and even the rare acoustic break here doesn’t feel that dissimilar to the one in ‘Male Supremacy’, but with this release the thrash and doom (the latter sometimes spiced up with goth influence) are in equal parts the core of this album’s sound. It’s as if every element present in their sound beforehand has been extended out and turned up to 11; the occasional gloomy doom passage is now the bulk of each track, the thrash sections are even angrier and more blood-pumping than before and what few tender, melodic moments there were are now found at various key points throughout each song, with keyboards being there to help emphasise them.

Critical to this blend of ideas are the performances themselves, which are excellent. The drumming is unobtrusive but still creative and inventive, managing to keep the beat and throwing in a good few fills and double bass sections while not subtracting from the meat of the album; the guitars and vocals. The thrash riffs here don’t feel at all stale despite this album’s 1991 year of release because Carnivore were one of the progenitors of that NYHC-flavoured crossover thrash style; and indeed none of them would feel out of place on a Carnivore album, being lethally aggressive and memorable. The slower doom metal passages are great too; the more atonal moments such as those found in ‘Der Untermensch’ are heavy and oppressive, hitting as hard as the earliest sludge metal bands that were getting started around the time. The more melodic moments backed up with keyboards are a nice touch of variation and give the album a lot of character, and while the keys here aren’t as lush as they’d be on later albums Josh Silver still does a lot with a little. This is especially evident on ‘Unsuccessfully Coping…’ and ‘Prelude to Agony’, which both take on the larger-than-life quality of something like ‘Bloody Kisses’ at points especially combined with the vocal delivery, the latter having always been Carnivore’s and TON’s trump card. Pete’s vocals here are as captivating and distinctive as the always were and would be. He mixes up his hardcore punk-tinged bellowing during the thrash sections with more tonal work to fit the more melodic sections, and is backed up by gang vocals at various points to great effect (‘I know you’re fucking someone else!’ and ‘Waste! Of! Life!’ are truly legendary moments.) He even starts to incorporate goth-tinged bass-baritone singing that would become a staple of later TON albums, most notably on ‘Prelude to Agony’. His position here as a very flawed narrator is pulled off very well; he truly comes across like a troubled, deranged and sick person. Whatever style he shoots for he always manages to pull off with amazing conviction, and whatever emotion the lyrics are trying to convey he always delivers.

What really separates this from TON’s later albums is the general atmosphere, one that results from how well the band work as a unit and how evocative the music manages to be as a whole – even at its most goth rock-infused this doesn’t have any of the dry, dark, tongue-in-cheek goth vibes of Bloody Kisses or the romantic, lovey-dovey feel of October Rust. Instead, the vibe throughout is a really ugly and dark one, which ties into its concept of murdering one’s lover due to infidelity and then taking one’s own life out of guilt over the act. The feel is much more in line with Carnivore’s deliberately offensive schtick than anything that would follow and the sheer bitterness and hatred on display here is something to behold. The more keyboard-y sections recall those later TON albums a bit more, but the doom sections are crushing, droning and gloomy (and at times bring to mind World Coming Down) while the thrash sections are no-holds-barred bursts of anger. This atmosphere is a big part of why this album works as well as it does, as the songs here are honestly abrupt collisions of crossover/thrash and doom/goth with no real progression between them. Rather than coming across like an incoherent and jumbled mess however, the songs listen more like emotional roller-coasters full of twists and turns, ones that consistently keep the listener guessing as Pete tells his depraved tales of murder and suicide. The music shifts tone with the lyrics perfectly, with the murderous ‘Prelude to Agony’ being the darkest and most crushing song here and the final track ‘Gravitational Constant…’ being a slab of pure, morose goth/doom to fit its themes suicide ideation.

There are a couple of questionable outliers in the track list that are worth mentioning – ‘Glass Walls of Limbo (Dance Mix)’ is a little under 7 minutes of gloomy industrial noise which is underpinned by a singular metallic clattering beat while numerous layers of non-lyrical vocalisations and chants get worked into it. While it’s a pretty interesting mood piece it breaks up the flow of the album somewhat, and given that these sounds are nowhere else to be found on the album it listens like a strange stylistic detour that doesn’t lead to anything or advance the narrative of the album. ‘The Misinterpretation of Silence…’ meanwhile starts a long tradition of humorous interludes on TON albums, and it’s literally 64 seconds of silence. It’s hard to hate a blank canvas but there’s no joke here at all; it flat out did not need to be here. All this said however, this is still a timeless and one-of-a-kind debut that only Pete and the boys could have come up with. Any fan of metal should listen to this at least once; it’s truly one of the greatest and most unique albums in metal, and an amazing start for an amazing band.

(Note: I am reviewing the unedited version of the album, which features ‘It’s Never Enough’ as track 4 and ‘Unsuccessfully Coping with the Natural Beauty of Infidelity’ as its penultimate track, with the edited version swapping the latter for ‘Gravitational Constant: G = 6.67 x 10⁻⁸ cm⁻³ gm⁻¹ sec⁻²’ and dropping the former altogether. As this means the unedited version has more new material, this is the one I recommend.)

This compilation released about a year after World Coming Down is a bit of an odd beast, as far as compilations go. At best this sort of release compiles rarities such as demos, b-sides and outtakes and if pulled off correctly can function as unique albums in their own right; while at worst they have nothing new on them at all and instead present material that has already been heard before on past albums. The Least Worst Of straddles a line between the two, as it mostly offers up alternate versions of past material, with a few rarer or exclusive tracks in the mix as well.

A significant chunk of this album’s running time is devoted to edited versions of songs we’ve heard before, that have either been released as b-sides or are unique to this album. All of them are shortened radio edits, and they all suffer from the same problems. While most of these songs still function, retaining some of the atmosphere and getting the same basic ideas across, they lose a lot of the larger-than-life quality the originals had as they do not flow nearly as well, with transitions from section to section feeling much more abrupt and sections being omitted entirely. The edit of ‘Black No. 1’ in particular is truly terrible and entirely skip-worthy – it doesn’t flow or listen like a complete song at all, sounding more like various sections of different songs stapled together with no rhyme or reason. There’s also the matter of the remix of their version of ‘Cinnamon Girl’, which changes the song for the much worse. The drum machine used previously sounds much more like a sampled electronic kit now, and the guitars and vocals sound similarly processed and electronic due to being slathered in effects. The guitars cut out abruptly at points, particularly for the verses, but otherwise the song remains structurally unchanged. It’s an interesting edit but I feel like removing the spacey, atmospheric sounds of the original album does nothing to help the song at all.

This album only really falls into the best of formula on two occasions. Both versions feature a track from Slow, Deep and Hard as their penultimate song, and while both of these are great, we’ve heard these before. In addition, songs almost always work better in the context of the album from which they came, and as such there’s no real reason to listen to these tracks as presented here; they are inferior due to the context they are in. The other is a ‘remix’ of the track ‘My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend’ – I guess it is a remix but it barely qualifies as it is very nearly the same song; the only alteration I can hear is that the beat during the first few seconds of the song is removed, leaving only the organ before the drums come in anyway followed by the guitars. It’s otherwise identical to the original and therefore totally pointless for the same reasons that the songs from the debut are.

There are however, a few songs that are of more interest. The main draw for me on this album is the three World Coming Down session outtakes, as that is in my eyes one the greatest metal albums ever released. The songs in question are ‘It’s Never Enough’, ’12 Black Rainbows’ and the closer ‘Stay Out of My Dreams’. All are great representations of that album’s sound, with dreary and ugly stretches of riffing being broken up by occasional moments of sheer beauty, sparse but effective keys contributing to these and uniformly hopeless and negative lyrics. ’12 Black Rainbows’ is a shorter, catchier number with an explosive chorus that could have been a single, while the other two are more expansive and progressive tracks, combining crushing doom metal riffs with more atmospheric sections and frequent changes of pace – particularly in the case of ‘It’s Never Enough’, which contains thrashy up-tempo sections that hearken back to the days of Slow, Deep and Hard.

Also of note are two alternate takes of covers from earlier in the band’s career. ‘Hey Pete (Peter’s Ego Trip Version)’ is their version of the popular song ‘Hey Joe’, originally from The Origin of the Feces but without the faux live noise present on that album. The lyrics have been re-written lyrics to fit the theme of revenge against an unfaithful girlfriend present on Slow, Deep and Hard and its aforementioned ‘live’ counterpart. It’s been turned from a laid back psychedelic rocker into a gloomy doom metal number, as is befitting of the new lyrics. ‘Black Sabbath (From the Satanic Perspective)’ meanwhile is their take on Black Sabbath’s classic (originally from Nativity in Black and later on reissues of Bloody Kisses), albeit with lyrics that show the other side of the story told by the original. The song is a great deal heavier and slower than the original, bordering on funeral doom speeds during the verses, and Ozzy’s agonised singing has been replaced by Pete’s bass-baritone crooning. Both of these are great examples of covers, having been translated and built upon properly to turn the originals into different beasts entirely, ones that sound so natural and distinctly Type O Negative that they both could have been written by the band.

A heavily discounted purchase is recommended when seeking this album out. It is an incredibly mixed bag, coming out only slightly positive when factoring in the amount of inferior edits and redundant inclusions present. The radio edits are all inferior to the originals though they’re mostly alright and not entirely disposable, but barring the two covers and the three new originals everything else here is skipworthy or redundant. This album is by no means essential as a whole and it certainly is not a good introduction to the band’s career, but it does have some merit.

For what it’s worth, I do appreciate the good humour needed to put absolute silence on a best of compilation; that alone is worthy of a chuckle.