Search - White Zombie :: Let Sleeping Corpses Lie

K. K. (GAMER)
Reviewed on 7/4/2023...

Nope!

1 of 1 member(s) found this review helpful.

Surprisingly minimalist package from purveyors of excess

M. Nichols | West Chester, OH United States | 11/25/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Man, I hate to admit it, but I am disappointed with Let Sleeping Corpses Lie.



Ironically, I wasn't expecting much in terms of content and am pleased to have a partial "one-stop shop" for White Zombie's records (all studio records are here with soundtrack and tribute album one-offs, but remix eps, for example, are nowhere to be found). I knew what I was getting, track-wise, and cannot complain. For the newbie, much of this stuff has been hard to come by (fans in the 90s could still get Make Them Die Slowly in record stores but the first albums were generally findable only via bootlegs (albeit decent ones)). The noisy scumrock left many of the neophytes turned on by La Sexorcisto-Devil Music Vol. 1, frankly, turned off and many were perfectly happy to accept the Geffen debut as an alternative starting point. These early tracks sound great here and are cool to have in "official form."



What I am so sorely diappointed with is the package. The "fondlability and fetishability factor," to misquote Frank Zappa. White Zombie has been almost as much about the image and artwork as the music and the buyer is left swindled. I recall a radio interview in 1995 or so promoting Astro Creep: 2000 -- Songs of Love, Destruction, and Other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head in which Rob spoke about how much the band enjoyed giving the fans a complete package that included stickers, posters, etc. Here we get a small, sepia digipak with some artwork, all in the same tone, none in color, no lyrics, no notes from the band members or critics, no complete historical articles, no original cover art, NOTHING. We get something nice to load into iTunes and then file onto the shelf. I was so looking forward to tearing this sucker open and spending an afternoon reading through its book - now I guess I'll re-watch The Devil's Rejects (Unrated Widescreen Edition) instead.



With most bands, substance trumps style every time. With a band like White Zombie, they're intertwined. And while nice to have all the tunes (and a killer DVD) in one place, this cannot help but feel like a product rushed to market for Christmas that forgot a lot about its fanbase in the process."

Disappointing.

M. Behzadi | 11/27/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Preface: I am a HUGE White Zombie fan, and have been looking forward to this box set for years. As far as the quality of the music contained herein, this set gets a 5 out of 5.



1. Omissions. The set contains no remixes, which is neither surprising nor disappointing, since White Zombie's remixes were done by outside personel and, quite honestly, were never as good as the original recordings. Strangely, though, "Black Friday" and "Dead or Alive" are omitted from this set (maybe because they were only on the cassette version of "Gods on Voodoo Moon"?). Songs like "Star Slammer" which were previously recorded but never before released are also AWOL on the box set. What a shame.



2. Redundancy. La Sexorcisto and Astro Creep are contained, in their entirety, on Discs 3 and 4 (respectively). Anyone who's a big enough White Zombie fan to shell out this kind of money for the box set already has the two albums, both of which are owned by millions of fans across the world. Rob knows this, but included them anyway. Why? So he could justify a higher price tag? I feel like a moron for paying for something I already own.



3. Aesthetics. The packaging is very, very disappointing. Back in the day, Geffen declined to front the money to give Astro Creep the kind of elaborate booklet that Rob wanted. So, what did he do? He spent a big chunk of change out of his own pocket to give the album the kind of treatment it deserved. Sadly, Rob seems to have gotten miserly in his old age. The set's packaging is in the form of a compressed fold-out digipack. The booklet (which is in the form of a standard CD booklet, not an actual book, as I had hoped) is uninteresting and offers neither liner notes nor lyrics. This really caught me by surprised, as this is what usually makes box sets distinct from the rest of a band's catalogue. Rob really didn't come through on this.



In summary:

1. It's incomplete.

2. It has stuff you already have.

3. It doesn't look as nice as it could have.

BUT!

4. The music is great, and the quality of all the old pre-Sexorcisto tracks has been cleaned up a little bit.



Oh, and the DVD is good too, although the videos for Boogieman and One curiously omit clips from the films in which they were featured (licensing issues, perhaps?).



All in all, the good outweighs the bad. Buy it."