Rearranging the track list of AoM and BatS

[Umbrage]

i think that those albums are too distinct, and with different goals, that they can't really be compared...maybe only in a stylistic comparison.

Agreed.

Point taken. My issue with Blessed is the flat and uninteresting production...From a wider scope, I would call Altars stronger because it is more logical in its execution. The songs make sense in sequence, the feral energy of the band as a unit is perfectly preserved, and the (perhaps unintentional) proto black metal influence really just pushes the album up to extraordinary heights. They flawlessly blended their inspirations together and produced an album which has stood the test of time strongly.

Agreed.

the incoherence of tracks 2 and 3 (they are unfinished/awkward)

That's just fucking crazy talk right there

I was thinking about this a short while back: if you could rearrange the track lists of those two albums what would they be? You can make it a double album if you want, or you can take your fav tracks and use them in one album and dump the left-overs in the other. You don't need to use all songs. You don't control production however, the first album has the production of AoM and the second the production of BatS.

[Nightspirit]

Ideally, I'd make a double-CD with both albums, but if I absolutely had to choose (and I'd still miss the other tracks...) for one CD with an interesting re-take on the tracklist, my order would go:

1) The Ancient Ones
2) Blasphemy
3) Desolate Ways
4) Lord of All Fevers & Plague
5) Maze of Torment
6) Brainstorm
7) Visions from the Darkside
Abominations
9) Suffocation
10) Rebel Lands
11) Bleed For the Devil
12) Unholy Blasphemies
13) Blessed are the Sick
Hidden/Untitled) Fall From Grace

This was an exercise is budgeting excellence. Terrible feeling, but someday it might come in handy through another prism.

[Moringotto]

Although AoM has a few songs that are stronger than most of the individual tracks on BaTS, it's whole does not surpass the sum of it's parts in the way that BatS does. That is why I wouldn't touch BatS, even to add a couple tracks from Altars. If you had asked this question 18 years ago, I suppose Chapel of Ghouls and Immortal Rites could have been folded into the album somewhere between Fall From Grace and Abominations. A single track from Covenant deserves inclusion too.