PIG DESTROYER: “THE OCTAGONAL STAIRWAY”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Sep 302020
 


photo by Jay Dixon

 

(This is DGR’s review of the latest EP by Pig Destroyer, which is out now on Relapse Records.)

Honestly, before it was made clear what Pig Destroyer‘s latest EP The Octagonal Stairway was meant to be, there was the briefest of double-takes, as I could’ve sworn there was already an “Octagonal Stairway” single released way back in 2013. Eventual digging would prove that memory true, and it didn’t take much more to clarify what this EP was.

Pig Destroyer have made a name for themselves catching people off guard with some of their EP work, usually with grander aspirations than just a rocket-fueled grind assault. Their latest full-length Head Cage did the same thing but with giant mosh riffs and huge grooves instead of artistic exploration into other genres. That being the case, even with a name like Pig Destroyer it’s still fun to see what the band are going to hurl at you through your speakers.

In this case the EP is a newly approached version of its title song, a collection of two of their singles that came out in 2019 – one via Decibel flexi disc and another an Adult Swim singles release, much like the title track here – and then three electronic experiments that either resolve into sound or are otherwise meant to slowly crawl under the skin and unnerve you. If it feels to you as a listener like a release with multiple personalities fighting for some sense of identity, you wouldn’t be the only one in thinking so, but it is very convenient to finally have these songs under one roof if you weren’t able to find them otherwise. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2018’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 23): PIG DESTROYER AND MANTAR

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2018  No Responses »
Feb 082019
 

 

In the famous phrasing of Browning, my reach exceeded my grasp yesterday. After finishing a pair of premieres and a very large two-part round-up of new music, my brain was fried and my NCS time had expired, and so I had to skip a day in the rollout of this list. But now, to resume, prepare to get blasted to smithereens….

The great thing about getting blasted by songs like these two, and the reason they’re on this list, is because you want to get blasted by them over and over again, every time you’ve put your pieces back together again. Or at least I do.

PIG DESTROYER

The latest Pig Destroyer album surprised some people (a dismaying surprise in some quarters), but it really shouldn’t have. As DGR put in his NCS review, “chaotic-ping-ponging around the metal genre-sphere” has been the band’s bread and butter, with their discography “translating to never quite knowing what you’ll get upon first picking up a new release, outside of the band’s trademark speed”.

In the case of Head Cage (again quoting DGR), it represented “the hardest right turn the band have made yet — like a car screeching against the outside railings of a highway off-ramp — taking on a groove-heavy sound in the midst of all that grind, resulting in an album that is overall far less chaotic than what they’ve put forth before, and also a hell of a lot of shameless ‘fun’”. Continue reading »

DGR’S QUEST TO TURN 2018 INTO A COFFEE TABLE BOOK – ISSUE THREE: 30-21

 LISTMANIA 2018  1 Response »
Jan 022019
 

 

(Here’s the third installment of DGR’s 5-part year-end effort to sink our site beneath an avalanche of words and a deluge of music.)

Now that I’ve broken it out from the tremendous bulk of the rest of my year-end collective, I’m amused by how much world traveling this specific subset of the list does. It spends a surprising amount of time in France (which has done very well for itself these past few years), some time in the States, some time in Australia, and even manages to touch base with both Canada and Sweden for a few. It is also probably the most varied intsallment so far — the tech-death crews make a strong play here, but you’ll also start seeing some of the prefix-core resurgence that happened recently, as well as some ugly-as-fuck grind (on two fronts). And then there’s however in the hell Author & Punisher might be described.

Oh, did I spoil that Author & Punisher is making an appearance here? Whoops. Well too bad, Beastland is fucking killer but if you want to know why you’ll have to read on and see just where the San Diego noise-engineer found himself. There’s still a lot of list left to go, and knowing me, at least two-thousand more words of intro paragraph left to be written somewhere so let’s get the third chunk of this motherfucker going. Continue reading »

PIG DESTROYER: “HEAD CAGE”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Sep 192018
 

 

(DGR reviews the new album by Pig Destroyer, which was released on September 7th by Relapse Records.)

It’s been five years since it happened, but when it comes to Pig Destroyer, this article here is always going to elicit a small chuckle out of me. Not because of the lineup shift or anything of that magnitude, but the way the news posting plays out. It almost reads as if the addition of a bassist to the lineup was an absolutely massive thing for these noise-grind stalwarts. It may very well have been, but the idea that the addition of a low-end to the band — something we commonly take for granted as part of a traditional metal lineup — was so important that Pig Destroyer issued a press release to announce it (again, entirely inferred and not the purpose of the article) is so off-kilter that I can’t help but smile a bit.

But, if you had to pick anything to describe the chaotic-ping-ponging around the metal genre-sphere that Pig Destroyer‘s overall discography has represented, Off-Kilter may just work for what the band have made their bread and butter — flying right on the edge of grind, and pushing at its boundaries. In fact, it has often felt like every single Pig Destroyer release has been a soft re-launch of the band, as they’ve played with drone, doom, adding various electronic samples to the overall sound, all of it roughly translating to never quite knowing what you’ll get upon first picking up a new release, outside of the band’s trademark speed.

Which is why the group’s newest release Head Cage proves to be interesting, if not polarizing, in part because it represents the hardest right turn the band have made yet — like a car screeching against the outside railings of a highway off-ramp — taking on a groove-heavy sound in the midst of all that grind, resulting in an album that is overall far less chaotic than what they’ve put forth before, and also a hell of a lot of shameless “fun”. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: THOU, PIG DESTROYER, AUTHOR & PUNISHER, SEPTEKH, WAXEN, PARTHOLÓN

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Aug 092018
 

 

I mentioned late last week as I was headed off to New Mexico for the weekend that I’d be gone from Seattle all this week, too. And that has come to pass.

I’ve been in Atlanta since Tuesday for my fucking day job, cranking away from early to late, with little time to check out new music and even less time to write about it. To keep from falling abysmally far behind I threw together this round-up, but am too pressed by my job to write much about these new tracks and videos. You’ll like them anyway — at least I hope you will.

THOU

Yesterday Louisiana’s Thou released a video for a song called “The Changeling Prince” off their new album Magus (cover above), which will be released by Sacred Bones Records on August 31st. It was directed by Bryan Funck and Mitch Wells. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: PIG DESTROYER, REVOCATION, THE RITUAL AURA, KVALVAAG

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Jul 112018
 

 

A whirlwind trip to Denver for my fucking day job prevented me from posting anything yesterday other than my premiere and review of the new Temple Desecration album. So I’ve got some catching-up to do. Later today I’ll post Part 2 of a post I began on Monday (“Doom Meets Death”) along with a couple more song premieres and the beginning of a three-day series of photos by Teddie Taylor from this year’s edition of Northwest Terror Fest in Seattle. But first, it’s time for a mid-week round-up of new music and videos.

PIG DESTROYER

Pig Destroyer’s new album, Head Cage, has been high on our list of highly anticipated albums for the second half of this year. Yesterday they provided the album’s first single (and video), “Army of Cops“. To put things politely, it produced some mixed reactions across the interhole. For example, there was this exchange among certain people affiliated with NCS, whose names I’ve concealed because I didn’t ask permission to quote them: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: PIG DESTROYER, BURIAL HORDES, AGELESS SUMMONING, MARDUK

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Jun 272018
 

 

I had hoped to prepare a massive round-up for today, given how many excellent new tracks have been thrown at us this week, and how many fine new things I’ve recently discovered that appeared in previous weeks. Alas, other distractions have prevented me from making this post as gargantuan as I’d hoped. But there’s always tomorrow….

PIG DESTROYER

To begin, I have only a teaser… but what a titillating teaser it is. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: AENAON, OBSCURE SPHINX, SATAN’S WAR MACHINE, AND THE ABYSMAL PREDATOR TOUR

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Aug 292016
 

Aenaon-Hypnosophy

 

Happy Monday! I mean that sincerely, despite the usual depressive aspects of the day, because this Monday brought us three exciting new song premieres that I discovered soon after caffeinating myself strongly enough to stun a bull, plus an announcement of an exciting U.S. tour. And here’s what I found:

AENAON

As our regular readers are well aware, we have become ardent followers of the Greek band Aenaon since discovering the wonders of their 2014 album Extance, which made no fewer than four different year-end lists published at our site, as well as a host of our reader’s lists. It was also the source of a song (“Grau Diva”) that I included in my list of 2014’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. You may then be able to imagine how eagerly we have been awaiting the band’s new album, Hypnosophy. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: TOO DAMNED MANY THINGS TO PUT IN THE TITLE OF THIS POST

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Sep 042013
 

Yesterday I posted our final article of the day at about 1:30 pm EDT and then turned my attention for the rest of the day to what I actually get paid to do. While I wasn’t looking, someone re-opened Pandora’s box and a horde of red-eyed bat-winged things flew out in a blizzard of leathery wings and ammoniac guano. Yeah, baby, a veritable flood of nasty shit — so many noteworthy news items and new songs that to fit all of them in this post will require that I wire my jaws shut and mumble only a few words per item. Here . . . we . . . GO!

SLAYER-GOJIRA-4ARM TOUR

It started with dates in Hollywood and NYC and predictably has now mushroomed into a full U.S. tour. Well, at least 16 cities in the fullness of the U.S., which do not include all the wonderful cities in the Pacific Northwest or 36 other states. But fear not, others may yet get to see Gojira (!!!), the aging remnants of Slayer, and Melbourne’s 4ARM, because more dates will be announced later. Here are the ones announced yesterday:

OCTOBER
25 The Joint at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas, NV
28 Hollywood Palladium, Hollywood, CA
30 Events Center @ San Jose State, San Jose, CA Continue reading »

I’LL HAVE A SHOT AND A PERMANENT FUNERAL

 Metal News  10 Responses »
May 132013
 

Three Floyds bills itself as “a small Artisanal craft brewery located in Munster, IN just down the road from Chicago, IL”. I found out about them because they’ve brought out an ale named “Permanent Funeral”, after the song of the same name from Pig Destroyer’s Book Burner album. The ale’s description is as follows:

“The wolf inside this pale ale is trying to walk upright. This bright and aromatic beer was brewed with our friends in the band Pig Destroyer.”

It’s too bad Three Floyds is so far away from Seattle and so limited in its distribution, because they’d sell the shit out of this stuff here. I mean, even if it tasted like piss from a diabetic goat, lots of people would pay for the pleasure of ordering “a shot and a Permanent Funeral” at their local watering hole, and then drinking the brew from a bottle with a label like the one above.

Plus, it appears that Permanent Funeral will knock you on your ass. Continue reading »

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