Type O Negative sounded how clove cigarettes smell, how crushed red velvet feels, how black hair dye looks when it stains your bathroom sink. Led by singer and bassist Peter Steele—a towering figure with bone structure to die for, best described as either Evil Thor or Dracula with a gym membership—these Brooklyn-based purveyors of goth metal spent their career exploring the genre’s inherent tension between seriousness and schtick. Originally released on Record Store Day in a limited run and now reissued (on gorgeous green vinyl), None More Negative packages nearly that entire career, featuring all six albums from their years on Roadrunner Records. (Their final effort, Dead Again, was released on another label and isn’t included here.) It’s a suitably massive set for a band best known for its eerie epics.

The best-known of these kick off 1993’s Bloody Kisses: “Christian Woman” explores its subject’s sublimation of sexuality into the crucified body of Christ with all the subtlety of “Ken Russell’s The Devils: The Musical.” It continues with “Black No. 1,” an affectionate send-up of a goth girl’s beauty regimen that launched the band into the public consciousness, via a striking black-and-white video that received heavy Beavis and Butthead rotation. Both songs showcase Steele’s distinctive, vampiric baritone, complete with theatrically rolled R’s and overemphasized consonants (“on her milk-white neck-kkh, the devil’s mark-k”). The man eroticized diction.

I reviewed Type O Negative’s box set None More Negative for Pitchfork. I should note that for me, any number grade above like 6.2 means “you should give this a listen, it’s worth spending some time with.” To the extent that the numbers are under my control (I never have the final say) I grade with that in mind, something that gets lost when people react to the numbers alone but which I believe is borne out in the text of the reviews. Which I hope people read!