CD pre-review: Pig Destroyer--"Phantom Limb"

To me, Pig Destroyer's music is like popcorn. I eat one piece of it, and it's over quickly enough. But then I eat another piece. And another...and another...and soon many minutes have passed and I find that I have eaten the entire bag of popcorn. If you can picture a band named Pig Destroyer's music having that shared quality with popcorn, either you like the same kind of music I like, or you have a highly malleable imagination capable of grasping absurd similes. Either way, thanks for sticking with me.

I almost never start out with the intention of listening to an entire Pig Destroyer CD. Due to the brevity of their songs (a good deal of which clock in at under 2:00) I find they make great "filler" music. For example, if I'm waiting for something to happen on my PC I might thing to myself, "Well, I've got about two and a half minutes until that is done and I can start doing something else. Just enough time for one Pig Destroyer song!" One minute and fifty dense seconds later I have been pummeled by a sonic wall of shrieking nihilistic violence, and I find myself wanting more. So many of Pig Destroyer's songs act as teasers for themselves, so short and packed full of great riffs that the completed song leaves you (if you're me, and I am) waiting for the whole thing to repeat a couple of times. Instead, it crashes immediately into the next short-lived slab of ferocity, and the cycle begins anew. The next thing I know, I've reached the end of the CD and what I was originally doing when I called for 2 minutes of "filler" music has been forgotten about.

For the uninitiated among you, Pig Destroyer sound almost exactly like what their name implies: the musical equivalent of a large fleshy creature being violently reduced to nothing, a spastic fit of unreasoning primal violence leaving not even blood or bone fragments in its wake. Part grindcore, part metal, equally at home being inhumanly fast and chuggingly...um...mid-tempo. I generally don't care much for grindcore, because simple riffs played over hyper-sonic drumming just don't hold my attention. But there's more to Pig Destroyer than simple grindcore. The disturbingly intense vocal delivery of J.R. Hayes and the seemingly impossible drumming of Brian Harvey are as brutal as any of their straight-up grindcore counterparts, but it is the inventive guitar work of Scott Hull that gives Pig Destroyer its complexity and that compulsive popcorn-like quality. There's no bass guitar, which probably just saves time mixing it out. Instead, there is a dense wall of multi-tracked guitar. Hull is also the mastermind behind grind veterans Agoraphobic Nosebleed, and in the more metal-influenced Pig Destroyer he shows that not only can he write (and play) ultra-fast grind parts that are actually interesting, but he can stretch out a little bit and write killer metal riffs as well, in styles ranging from thrash to Sabbath-like thick chugging. I think he's one of the most exciting guitarists in metal today. Hull also produces, and makes up for the total lack of bass guitar by layering on a heavy yet incredibly rich patchwork of guitar tones.

When a pre-release copy of Pig Destroyer's upcoming CD Phantom Limb floated my way out of the great digital ether well ahead of its June 12 release date I was pleasantly surprised. After all, their previous CD, the critical darling Terrifyer, had that popcorn-like quality. After a brief round of "fun with ID3 tags" I uploaded the pre-release to my new 30GB video iPod to check out the first couple tracks. A couple became four, which became eight. At that point I realized that I might as well blog about it while listening to the rest fo the CD. The trouble is, Pig Destroyer play a lot faster than I blog, so I've already listened to the thing twice and am just getting around to writing about it. That's okay, though. I'm happy to report that Phantom Limb is just as popcorn-like as Terrifyer. Maybe even more so.

Phantom Limb is an evolutionary advancement of the Pig Destroyer sound. Like previous CDs, you can expect a dizzying mix of spastic grinding fits and fiercely chugging metal/hardcore. Scott Hull's fantastic guitar playing is cemented by an equally unbelievable performance by Brian Harvey on drums, and over the top of it all J.R. Hayes unleashes a torrent of indecipherable cathartic screams and screeches with the venom of a full-blown psychotic freakout. This time around Pig Destroyer have added a fourth band member, bringing Blake Harrison into the fold on samples and noise. It's pretty safe to say that if you liked Terrifyer, Phantom Limb is a must-have.

Production quality on Phantom Limb is top-notch. Terrifyer was a great-sounding CD too, but it had a very compressed midrange sound to it which gave it a feral rawness. Phantom Limb has more of a full-bodied sound to it. There is still plenty of midrange crunch to the guitars, but this time out they dig deeper into the low registers for greatly increased punch. The added thickness greatly benefits the "slower" (read: "sub-hypersonic") sections, with a powerful chugga-chugga that is dense and visceral but never muddy. J.R.'s vocals also benefit from the increased production values. The distortion and various effects used on his voice just sound better, and there's even some experimentation with gutteral vocals, like in the four-minute epic "Loathsome". Brian's drums have a sound I wish was more prevalent in metal records: clear and distinct without being overprocessed and "clicky". This disc is full of fantastic drumming, and even during the unbelievably fast blast beats the sound stays clear and powerful. As a drummer, I can't tell you how much I appreciate that! As a whole, Phantom Limb sounds both polished and raw, which is no small feat. It also manages to have a significant bottom end without the aid of a bass guitar. I'm assuming Scott Hull produced, but whoever pulled this off needs to be recognized. This is one great sounding metal release.

Phantom Limb contains no major surprises when compared to previous Pig Destroyer releases, but it takes what the band has done progressively better with each release and continues the trend of brutal greatness. Song length is slightly longer than in the past without being a major departure. Of the 14 "normal" songs on the CD (track 15 is an ambient recording focusing largely on crickets) seven are of that crack-like "under 2:00" length, while six clock in at better than 3:00. That may not seem like much, but in Pig Destroyer's hands it's like an epic. They rank very high in what Frank Zappa called "statistical density". The slightly increased song length makes each song a little more individually satisfying than on previous releases. Curiously, this does nothing to weaken their addictive "just one more" popcorn-like quality. Come June 12, this is a CD I'll definitely be picking up. If you're a Pig Destroyer fan, I strongly encourage you to do the same. If listening to Pig Destroyer makes you feel like there's a man behind you with a knife who thinks you'd be sexier without your arms, well, I'm not going to try to convince you that Phantom Limb will make you feel any different. It's hard to explain, but that just works for some of us.

By the way, I've now listened to the complete CD four times. Are you starting to understand why it takes me so long to post anything?