PIG DESTROYER TO PLAY TWO SHOWS IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jun 052011
 

I’m absolutely fawning in my admiration of Pig Destroyer. Fawning, I tell you. Their music is the aural equivalent of a fetal alien ripping its way out of your chest, except in this case it feels damn good to have that toothsome little bastard explode your body cavity in a spray of crimson gore. Plus, the members of the band are just so damned interesting. They lead more-or-less normal suburban lives and work at more-or-less normal day jobs (check this fascinating feature to see what I mean by “more or less normal”) and they play insane music pretty much to please themselves.

They’re all very talented musicians, perhaps most especially Scott Hull, who MetalSucks justifiably named to the No. 6 spot on its nearly finished list of The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists. In their eloquent words (with which I fully agree): “The guy is just a riff factory, churning out a seemingly endless parade of ear-fuckery. . . . Various forms of punk, speed, and death metal all converge in the tips of Hull’s fingers, spilling out as pretty much the best grindcore and powerviolence currently being created anywhere on the planet.”

So, with that backdrop, you can imagine how excited I was to see that Pig Destroyer is scheduled to play a show at El Corazon in Seattle on September 10. Seeing that (as I was updating our NW Metal Calendar section today), I thought, “Holy fuck, these guys never tour. I wonder if maybe this is part of an actual, national Pig Destroyer tour?” So, I did some web surfing. Unfortunately for those of you who don’t live in the Pacific Northwest of these United States, it doesn’t look like this is part of a tour.

BUT . . . I did find that Pig Destroyer is in the vicinity because they’re appearing at MUSICFEST NW — a five-day festival (similar to SXSW) that will run September 7-11 in Portland, Oregon. Musically, this festival is all over the map, with metal being only a tiny part of the genres represented. But it turns out there are some other well-known metal acts scheduled to appear at the festival. (more after the jump, including a Pig Destroyer song, just for the fuck of it.) Continue reading »

FAST, THEN SLOW

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  17 Responses »
Oct 092010
 

A couple days ago we put up a post called “Slow, Then Fast”, the focus of which was a temporal experiment that our fellow metal bloggers at Death Metal Babboon conducted with a piece of doomy sludge (or sludgy doom) by a UK band called Blut. DMB honcho Niek took a cut from one of Blut’s very loooooong songs and sped it up by a factor of three, and reported on the results. We, in turn, put those same two tracks up on our site in order to share the interesting outcome of Niek’s experiment.

This gave us ideas. Because we do most things ass-backwards, we thought it would be interesting to flip Niek’s experiment around. We wanted to take a really fast song — a nice piece of balls-to-the-wall grindcore — and slow it down by a factor of three.

The original plan was to do this with a purely instrumental track, because we thought the slowing down of the music might make the vocals sound fucked up. But after reading the comments on that “Slow, Then Fast” post, we decided to use a track with vocals in addition to one without.

So that’s what we did. We used the same audio-editing software that Niek used, and we applied its magical tools to two songs: “Cemetery Road” by Pig Destroyer and an instrumental track called “Scepters” by Behold the Arctopus. The results surprised the hell out of us. Hear what happened . . . after the jump. Continue reading »

PIG DESTROYER, FOR THE FOURTH

 Off Topic  6 Responses »
Jul 022010
 

Those of us who live here in the U.S. of A. have a long 4th of July weekend ahead of us. Lots of flag-waving hoo-ha, beer-drenched barbeques, illegal fireworks, and general ignorance about the ridiculously insane, life-imperiling act that the holiday commemorates.

The self-satisfied flag-waving is something you can do when you come out on top, but I’d rather think back about what it must have been like on the original date in 1776 when all those dudes in the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence — and brought an immediate British death sentence on their heads for their revolutionary act of defiance.

Those dudes were pretty much the opposite of patriotic. They were basically yelling a full-throated “Fuck You!” across the Atlantic to the nation under whose flag they had lived and prospered, with no real plan about how to back it up when the British military machine would inevitably show up to squash them like annoying roaches.

To help get in that 1776 mood, which is kind of the opposite of patriotism, I’m gonna listen to some Pig Destroyer. Just in case you feel like a little fire-breathing metal for the Fourth, we’ve got four PD videos for you after the jump. We wish we could see your faces when you get to the fourth one. Continue reading »

THIS COMP KILLS FASCISTS (AND MAY KILL YOU TOO)

 Metal News  2 Responses »
Jun 222010
 

Scott Hull is a fascinating dude. He’s the guitarist and producer for the blazingly awesome Pig Destroyer and Agoraphobic Nosebleed. He’s an incredibly knowledgeable observer of the most remote corners of the underground metal scene. He’s smart as a whip and very articulate. He works as an IT specialist when he isn’t creating furious, brain-scrambling music. He’s a father and he lives in a nice suburban home in the D.C. area.

If you’ve got more time to burn after you finish this post, you oughta read the feature on Hull, Pig Destroyer, and the grind scene that was published, of all places, in The Washington Post‘s Sunday magazine last August. It’s fascinating to read a non-metalhead reporter’s peak inside the world of a band like Pig Destroyer, trying to describe the experience for the kind of people who read The Washington Post (i.e., people unlike you and me) (“As the band ripped into the first song, I had the sensation of standing under a bridge as it was being torn apart.”)  It’s long, but worth reading through to the very end. Check it out here.

In 2008, Hull pulled together a collection of music from multiple underground bands and brilliantly named it This Comp Kills Fascists. It featured material from acts like Insect Warfare, Magrudergrind, Weekend Nachos, and Kill the Client, as well as the first new music in more than a decade from legendary grind militia Brutal Truth. It served as something of a launching pad for the careers of all those bands and more. It included 51 tracks of music from 14 collectives.

Now, Hull has done it again, with This Comp Kills Fascists 2 — except more so. The new compilation is set for a June 28 release on Relapse Records and is available for pre-order at this location. It’s an international grab-bag of brain-coring grindcore, powerviolence, hardcore, and metal from bands you’ve probably never heard of — 19 of them to be precise, playing 74 tracks of music. That video at the top of this post is a trailer for the album, and after the jump, we’ve got more news about the project — and a widget that will allow you to stream the whole ear-bleeding thing right here. Continue reading »

DECIBEL SEES THE FUTURE

 Listmania, Metal News  No Responses »
Dec 242009
 

Those gun-jumpers at Decibel magazine are at it again. Not content to select their list of the Top 40 albums of 2009 in about October (see our previous post about that), the issue that just hit my mailbox (optimistically dated February 2010) includes a feature called “The Top 25 Most Anticipated Records of 2010.” At least Decibel‘s writers poke fun at themselves in the intro that precedes their many following pages of prognostications:

“Decibel‘s always been about more than more past and present: Our powers of clairvoyance increase exponentially with each new day.  Hell, our grip on the future is such that we’re thinking about covering the coming decade’s 100 best metal albums before summer, just to get them out of the way.  As for the list below, remember this: We’ve heard — and utterly endorse — everything on it . . . including the stuff not yet written.”

To be honest, we were thinking of putting together our own list of bands whose new albums we’re stoked to see in 2010.  Might still do that if holiday laziness doesn’t completely gobsmack us. And we really do enjoy reading Decibel every month. But still, just can’t resist poking a little fun.

And in the poking-fun vein, we also came across Decibel‘s 2010 Media Kit. This is the sales piece that the mag provides advertisers to convince them how much folding green metalheads have to spend (yeah, right) and how all you gotta do to collect it is advertise in Decibel. Lot’s of amusing stuff in there, which you can peruse here. There’s a page of demographic data about Decibel‘s audience that’s especially juicy.

So, after the jump, we’ll show you the bands that Decibel has pegged for the The Top 25 Most Anticipated Releases of 2010. We’ll highlight the ones that prompted us to say “Fuckin’ A!” Our reactions to the rest are some combination of “maybe,” “huh?”, and “Uh, no.” And just for kicks we’ll show you that page from Decibel‘s 2010 Media Kit that provides potential advertisers with demographic data about Decibel‘s readers. Enjoy. Continue reading »

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