Let me say it right out: any band–and I’m talking about Washington, DC bone crushers Pig Destroyer–with the impeccable taste to cover the Angry Samoans’ “Lights Out” is okay by me.
A song about a teen fad that involves poking your own eyes out with a fork, “Lights Out” is a classic of its (nonexistent) genre and as such belongs in the Great American Songbook alongside Rogers and Hammerstein’s “I Enjoy Being a Girl” (you don’t say), Al Jolson’s “The Spaniard That Blighted My Life” (they’ll do that, those sketchy Spaniards), and Harry “Fetid Melon” Molardong’s queasily graphic “Sexy Dairy Animal Blues.” Why, Pig Destroyer has such good taste I almost want to take them home to meet my mother, except I’m afraid they might cook and eat her.
Formed in 1997, Pig Destroyer is a grindcore band of ferocious intensity, specializing in viciously abrasive–the more tender-eared might say unlistenable–songs designed to flash-fry your brain like a bug zapper. The band boasts a lead singer (J.R. Hayes) who sounds like an industrial accident; a guitarist (Scott Hull) who plays power chords capable of telepathically setting peoples’ hair on fire and who used to be in the prissily named Anal Cunt, the gentle folk who brought us “Hitler Was a Sensitive Man” and “Two Turds and a Golf Ball;” a drummer (Adam Jarvis) who produces a din that would cause Zeus to run for cover; and an electronics wizard (Blake Harrison) whose noisescapes and vocal samples add that special vile something essential to Pig Destroyer’s patented sucker punch to the solar plexus sound. The band’s songs remind me of what Agent Rogers says in Repo Man: “It happens sometimes. People just explode. Natural causes.” True, sometimes people do just explode, but sometimes those people happen to be listening to Pig Destroyer.
If what you’ve always longed to hear are songs of hardcore length combined with grindcore blast beats, down-tuned guitars, hypersonic tempos, and an insane asylum’s worth of incomprehensible growls, shrieks, and what I suspect are backmasked apologies for being so annoying, then Pig Destroyer–which has released five full-lengths, four EPs, and scads of split 7-inches over its 16-year career–is your cup of caterwaul. Many, if not most, of Pig Destroyer’s songs are here and gone before you can cry, “What is this crazy hullabaloo?” “Contagion,” for instance, clocks in at a virgin-orgasm 17 seconds, while “Snuff Film at Eleven” is a veritable “Stairway to Heaven” at 1:11. And the band’s 2000 release, 38 Counts of Battery, dishes up 38 cuts of clash and clangor in a little over 39 minutes, giving new meaning to Hobbes’ phrase “nasty, brutish and short.” But don’t let me give you the wrong impression; Pig Destroyer also boasts plenty of longer tunes, and is not averse on occasion to really, really stretching them out–the title track of its 2013 “Mass and Volume” EP clocks in at 19:05, while its 2008 release Natasha is one 37:38.
Pig Destroyer’s shorter tunes are the perfect length for me because I suffer from anterograde amnesia like that guy in Memento, and hence have no recollection whatsoever of what happened five minutes ago, much less where I put my latest magnum opus of rock criticism, Thou Hast Seen Nothin’ Till You’re Down on a Muffin: The Influence of Alfred Lord Tennyson on the Poetry of Aerosmith. And I’m not alone; Pig Destroyer’s J.R. Hayes claims to have no memory of writing the lyrics to the first seven tracks of 2004’s Painter of Dead Girls and concedes that even he can’t decipher them, although I honestly don’t understand how it makes much of a difference seeing as how Hayes’ vocals are totally unintelligible and remind me of the time I took acid and spontaneously commenced to speak perfect Scots. This made for a very long evening, what with my response to the offer of a whippet being, “Blythly may we niffer gin we git oor wab, it makes little differ, we hae tint oor plaid.”
The gentlemen in Pig Destroyer have brought us such great songs as the wonderful but absolutely berserk “Girl in the Slayer Jacket,” which sounds like a combination 34-car pileup/ exorcism in progress; the great “Permanent Funeral,” which is 100% guaranteed to give your grandmother a stroke at a distance of 100 yards; the catchy by Pig Destroyer standards (which is to say it’s not very catchy at all) “Carrion Fairy,” which sounds like Swans and Morbid Saint playing different songs at the same time; and the equally sorta catchy (although I wouldn’t suggest trying to dance to it unless you want to break every bone in your body) “Loathsome.” “Machete Twins” and “The Diplomat” are nice too, if by nice you mean having a moose stomp on your ear. Then there’s “Pixie,” a 6:07 drone-dirge that sounds disquietingly like Panzers rolling over Poles. And last but not least there’s “The Bug,” an egregious case of ear rape that opens with a sample of the beginning of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer–a nice literary touch from a band that really is “a gob of spit in the face of art.”
Finally, Pig Destroyer is well on its way to challenging Killdozer as the King of Covers. In addition to a 42-second take on Dwarves’ “Fuck You Up and Get High,” a fantastically scuzzed-up cover of Iggy and the Stooges’ “Down on the Street,” and a killer rendition of Helmet’s “In the Meantime,” Pig Destroyer released a covers EP “Blind Deaf and Bleeding” as part of a deluxe edition of 2012’s Book Burner that includes superb covers of Black Flag’s “Depression,” Negative Approach’s “Can’t Tell No One,” and Circle Jerks’ “Deny Everything,” amongst others. Blind Deaf and Bleeding is easily the band’s most accessible slab of vinyl, and I highly recommend it to beginners who want to check out Pig Destroyer but don’t want to end up institutionalized, drooling, and jabbering about mastodons wearing hobnailed boots. Now if somebody could just get Pig Destroyer to record some really cheesy covers–say REO Speedwagon’s “Time for Me to Fly” or Neil Diamond’s “Crunchy Granola Suite”–Killdozer would really have something to worry about.
But on to the show. I regrettably missed the opening acts because my body was covered in hundreds of welts–that’s the last time I agree to participate in a nude paintball tournament–but made it to the Black Cat on Friday, March 29 just in time to hear Pig Destroyer play a show so great that, to paraphrase the bat-rabid gun nut Ted Nugent, I will personally cut off my dick and eat it if Pig Destroyer isn’t the best grindcore band in all the land. Upon playing their first note, the front half of the hall instantaneously dissolved into a chaotic mosh pit, a guy in a full chicken suit went poultry surfing, and Pig Destroyer’s sheer volume blew open the rear doors and sent a dozen people tumbling down the steps, in what was probably the greatest tragedy since the Great Boston Molasses Disaster.
That said, I can’t really even describe the music, because clueless neophyte that I am, all twenty-four or so songs they played–it was difficult sometimes to tell when one song ended and another began–sounded like one long song to me, albeit a tremendously great one. The only exception to the band’s unremitting speed grind was “Jennifer,” an extended vocal sample that opened, “Jennifer wrestled her girlfriend playfully to the ground in front of the sno-cone stand and began licking at the girl’s eyeballs as if they were sugar cubes,” and went on in this vaguely erotic (if you’re into eyeball-licking that is) vein only to end with a man with his hand in his pants saying, “No no no, this is beautiful, this is art.” Otherwise it was one long ecstatic clamor, with the hefty Hayes keeping a two-handed grip on the mic and rocking back and forth on stage while electronics guy Harrison banged his head and pogoed, and a stone-faced Hull (I don’t think he moved his facial muscles, or his body for that matter, once) fired off stuttering riffs and Teutonic power chords capable of altering the flight paths of migrating geese a mile overhead.
My personal favorites were “Eve” and “The Bug” because guest star Kat Katz, of Agoraphobic Nosebleed (a band whose album Altered States of America features 100 songs in just under 22 minutes, making Pig Destroyer sound long-winded in comparison), joined Hayes on both of them, and their back and forth was irresistible, like a lovers’ spat set to music. I also enjoyed Richard Johnson’s (also of Agoraphobic Nosebleed) cameo on “The Underground Man,” a 32-second stop-and-start heartstopper that highlighted Jarvis’ ability to make his drums sound like a machine gun. I also particularly enjoyed “Thumbsucker,” “Permanent Funeral,” “The American’s Head,” “Deathtripper,” “Piss Angel,” “The Diplomat,” and “Sheet Metal Girl,” although I’ll be damned if I can tell you why, other than I wrote “great” about them in my notebook. Some things are simply impossible to put into words, such as what it felt like to get my penis pierced, and Pig Destroyer’s sheer sonic sturm und drang is one of them. All I know for sure is that the guys in Pig Destroyer play in perfect lockstep, know a thing or two about how to settle into a monstrous groove, and can–believe it or not–actually be described as funky. And one other thing; I asked a guy in the audience why he loved Pig Destroyer so much and he shouted over the noise, “Because they’re so fucking angry!” Me, I don’t think they’re angry; I think they’re just a bunch of guys who enjoy playing music that sounds like a collapsing skyscraper.
As for Hayes, I still couldn’t understand a single word that came out of his mouth, which is funny considering how after I got home I surfed the web and read that Axl Rosenberg described Hayes as “one of the most thought-provoking lyricists in all of extreme music.” I have no idea what basis Rosenberg has for saying this, unless “Grrrrarrrh Braaagh blaaah Aiiieeee!” is his idea of thought-provoking. That, or he has bat ears or something. Or, more likely access to a lyric sheet, which in the end is no more useful to the listener than the one impishly included in Meat Puppets I, where Curt Kirkwood does his level best to imitate a grass-clogged lawnmower.
After the show I cornered the guy in the chicken suit and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. Turns out his name is “Heavy Metal Chris,” and as for the chicken suit he told me, “It all started as a giant stoner moment five or six years ago and I’ve been doing it ever since.” I told him to keep up the good work, then immediately phoned the nearest mental hospital. We can’t have people running around in chicken suits, or pretty soon everybody will be running around in chicken suits, and the streets will soon be one large free-range chicken farm.
Finally, I bumped into Harry “Fetid Melon” Molardong, who acted pretty frisky for someone who’s 103 years old and who told me, “These guys are the greatest band I ever heard. All they need are a clarinet, a cow bell, and a live cow.” I quickly excused myself, caught a taxi home and, sucker for a fad that I am, poked my eyes out with a fork.
