Neologisms are where electronic music finds its music. Autechre’s IDM (the worst of labels) wouldn’t prosper in a world of real words. “Cipater” couldn’t be “Bike Ride”; “Dael” or “Gnit” couldn’t take their asynchronous routes with anything like their blank machine majesty if they were tarred with bad brushes like “Clown Grin” or “Telephone Box”.
Autechre would slip away as one-eyed, monobrowed Boards Of Canada cousins if they took just a few steps into linguistic clarity; they’d be lost out of the fog. Rock rock rock rock rock rock rock music generally turns away from this essential absence of meaning, finding hope instead in purity of expression, in distilled emotional aggregates which makes the title of Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs’ latest album, Viscerals, on the increasingly reliable Rocket Recordings, something worthy of attention.
Viscerals is an almost word, the kind of phrase you might expect from Samuel Beckett: “He kicked me amongst the viscerals”. Here lies the secret of this album, one which descends wholeheartedly into the fleshy torso of rock and plays with the entrails like a Roman haruspex.If you’re already a fan of Pigs x7 then perhaps you won’t be altogether surprised here. I’m yet to see them live, except via the gauze of YouTube, but you grok what they’re about and where they’re coming from; you understand at a, yes, visceral, level what they might have been listening to and how they’re struggling to release all this pent-up emotional energy. Yes, there’s Sabbath, standing there in the gloaming, slinging their guitars low and their eyebrows lower. Yes, this works as sludge-ish, doom-ish metal but, on this album, I’m hearing the grindier bits of Hawkwind, if generally without the accompanying 70s synthesiser swirls of that band. This is music that Michael Moorcock’s doomed hero Elric might actually have listened to (as opposed to music inspired by him, or, indeed, sung by him). I’ve seen Motörhead comparisons, but this feels a little like a Hawkwind offshoot that travels in a slightly different direction and I feel it’s important to say that it never sounds derivative. It’s a rough beast, slouching towards Bethel.
Viscerals starts hard and gets relentless, but never feels like pummelling the listener into submission; the riffs are roaring but they don’t seek to annihilate reason and a strange kind of clarity seeps through, aided by some excellent production (I’m mostly listening to this in the less-than-ideal anti-audiophile setting of my car) and a sense of black-hole space, even when there is very little moments of quiet. You can hear the air between the riffs and the drums and the vocals; you can tell also, strangely, that not all of them have long hair or beards (I did check tbh, but I didn’t need to). A trite point, perhaps, but one that seems to explain why I like their take on this kind of thing more than most others (I’m generally rock/metal averse) and why they’re currently pushing their heads about the masses (or, rather, through the masses).
There’s an eccentric vein running right through this album; Edith Sitwell would like them. They’d sit well as a kind of bombastic backdrop to a new production of Jarry’s Ubu plays; pataphysical rock for an increasingly absurdist age. If I had to pair two albums from fairly recent times it would be this and fellow Rocket Recordings artist Gnod, whose album I also reviewed on here. Twin beasts, these.
-Loki-
