When I interviewed local hardcore trio the New Flesh for the Baltimore City Paper in 2007, the band was in a middle of a transitional period. They had just parted ways with founding guitarist Danny Propert, and had begun playing shows with a new guitarist, Greg Dembeck. At the time, they had ambitions to finish recording their third album of material with Propert, and quickly follow it up with another album with the new lineup. Ultimately, however, those plans didn’t pan out. Instead late last year, the New Flesh released Hall Of Heads, a compilation featuring scraps of both projects along with other recordings, on drummer Rick Weaver’s label, Human Conduct Records.

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The disc’s opening four tracks are a collaboration with Mr. Ski Mask, an enigmatic veteran of numerous noise and metal bands who joins up with the New Flesh for some of the ugliest, nastiest sounds in the band’s discography, including the 10-minute “A Lesson In Manners.” The next six tracks are the results of the sessions for the unfinished album with Propert. Half of them, grouped as a three-part suite titled “Angela,” show a direction the band’s original lineup may have been heading in, stitching together shorter pieces into a larger whole, something like a collage.

Despite all the various elements of metal, psychedelia and noise that get mixed up in the New Flesh’s loud, confrontational sound, they’re at root a punk band, who sound most at home live, and seem to record mainly to capture the same sound on tape. So the inclusion of an on-air performance from WMUC’s Third Rail Radio is, unsurprisingly, the highlight of Hall Of Heads. And even though the in-studio live sound is almost a little too clean for the band’s controlled chaos, Weaver’s spastic drum fills and bassist Jason Donnells’s guttural bass tones have rarely sounded better, on or off stage than on “Whipping Boy/Wheel.”

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The disc ends with two heirlooms from the New Flesh’s change in guitarists: Old Ceremony, the demo cassette of the band’s first batch of songs with Dembeck, and one live track from their final show with Propert. Both are the most lo-fi recordings on the album, and presumably the new lineup will be better represented on future recordings, but both are an appropriate way to wind things down. Hall Of Heads isn’t quite a complete collection of the New Flesh’s non-LP recordings, and could’ve been improved by the addition of the “Dog” b/w “Memory Scrap” 7″ single. But for the sheer variety of textures and production styles, and the cumulative effect of over an hour of punishing noise, it has still eclipsed both of the band’s proper full-lengths to become perhaps the most essential New Flesh release to date.