Review: White Zombie - "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie"

I bought this even though I still have my old copies of "La Sexorcisto..." and "Astro-Creep 2000..." and I normally only re-buy stuff if there's lots of b-sides and live bonus material added. Practically every White Zombie song is on this thing, including the soundtrack material. The DVD is good, too, since I'd never had the chance to see the band live and only saw their videos in teeny low quality flash files. That's right, I never even saw the famous Beavis & Butt-head reaction that's mentioned in damned near every article and interview about the band!

After getting my copy of this, my excitement over finally hearing the early stuff in an 'official form' pretty much outweighed everything else. In the spirit of Beavis and Butt-head, this (the music) rules. Personally, I like all of it. The only WZ songs I still need to hear are on the rumored "Forgiven" demo that J.G. Thirlwell produced that got the band signed to Geffen in the first place. Yes, there are 2 songs from "Gods on Voodoo Moon" that were left off of "...Corpses..." but if you can do a blogsearch and are patient, you can find those.

Of course, that brings me to the stuff that sucks. Where the hell is the original artwork?? Since this 4-CD and 1 DVD set comes in a similar format to the "Deluxe Edition" reissues of other Geffen albums, with a slipcase that has the complete tracklist on the back, I'd expected more details than what are in the booklet. Instead of lots of awesome color art like what we got in the "Astro Creep..." booklet, all we have is a black and white collage of band photos and early flyers. While the basic info that should be on any box set/comp like this is there (like which tracks came from which albums, production credits, original year of issue, etc.) that's all there is! Instead of the treatment that Sonic Youth got (lots of pictures, art from the singles, pages of interviews with the band/someone who's a huge fan talking about how awesome the band is/was) there's pretty much nothing. At the very least, I was hoping for reprints of the artwork from the early albums. You didn't have to reprint the whole booklets for "Astro Creep" and "La Sexorcisto" since even the casual "their early stuff suxx0rz!1!!" WZ fans still own these or can rebuy them for cheap, but how's about something more than a monochrome collage that I could've done a better job on if I had access to a bunch of old gig flyers and the original releases? Part of the fun of WZ is the artwork, and after finally getting to see Rob Zombie's "El Superbeasto" comics (which rule), I'd expected way more from this comp, art-wise.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did pick this up used at a local record store. For what I paid ($50), it's well worth it. For $70-$80? Not without the artwork that it should have had.