For some reason, of all the Entombed records I usually see used in stores, I could never find a copy of their covers collection, Sons of Satan Praise the Lord. I could have bought Monkey Puss: Live in London 35 times over for the once it took me to actually get this CD. And yeah, I could’ve just downloaded it, but screw that. It’s a collection of random tracks, not an album. Pretty much the only thing holding it together is that they’re all pressed to disc. Plus it’s more fun this way.

The Patient Mrs. and I were in some town off 287 in North Jersey. I don’t even remember what it was. Somerville, maybe, or Somerset. Definitely Somersomething. We had chased down some Mongolian BBQ for lunch and lo and behold what was across the street but a store called Sound Exchange. That being the name of a shop I frequent in Wayne, I thought it would be cool to go in, if only to find out if they were affiliated.

From the outside, it actually looked like a home-audio kind of place. Surround sound systems, speakers, hi-fis, that kind of thing. They had a couple systems up front, but the whole midsection of the store was CDs (there was also a wall of VHS/DVD behind the counter) from whence I grabbed the special VHS/CD release of the third Danzig record in the crazy H.R. Giger artwork that would never in a million years be for sale these days for anything less than $100, if it got made at all, Perfect Strangers by Deep Purple, the CD from the Cross Purposes Live set by Tony Martin-era Black Sabbath, Bill Hicks‘ Rant in E-Minor (if nothing else, now I know where Denis Leary got his whole act from), and Sons of Satan Praise the Lord.

Somehow it’s so typical of Entombed not to just do a covers record, but to, over the course of their entire career, amass enough of them to make a double-disc release. The compilation came out on the band’s own Threeman Recordings/Music for Nations in 2002, and from Alice Cooper to Repulsion to S.O.D., it’s probably the best and most direct look at their influences you can get. There are a few clunkers (“21st Century Schizoid Man” seems to be more in tribute to Voivod‘s version of the song than King Crimson‘s, though I give credit for doing the chase part, and “Amazing Grace” is… included) but the reworkings of Roky Erikson‘s “Night of the Vampire,” Bob Dylan‘s “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” and the thrashing “Sergeant D. and the S.O.D.” more than make up for any missteps.

On the whole, I doubt it’s something I’m going to listen to every day, but whatever, it’s a cool collection, and honestly, having the disc(s) is half the point. I could have downloaded these tracks or found them on YouTube or somewhere else, but the experience of going to the store — in this case, one I’d never even been to before and just completely happened on (and not affiliated with the other store of the same name) — makes it. After getting ripped off on that Kyuss bootleg on eBay, it was cool to have some reinforcement that it’s still worth seeing out physical media. L-G Petrov singing KISS‘ “God of Thunder” is all the triumph I need.