LP Review: Feed The Rats by Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs

Ever since catching these guys headline at the Cluny venue in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England, towards the end of last year, we’ve been waiting for this record to drop, and by god how mightily it crashes to earth; psychedelic stoner riffs, earthly pounding drums, and vocals at their rawest, Feed The Rats is a hell of a statement from Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs that we’ve had on repeat for a good month now (hence the delayed review).

Pigs(x7) are a band containing members of other North Eastern England bands such as the fantastic Blown Out, Ommadon, and Khunnt, and the musical dexterity is expressed vividly on opening track ‘Psychopomp’, a 15 minute headfuck of thrusting riffs and psychedelic nuances that keep you gripped to the songs’ core base of being a heavy-ass rock song. The pace never falters, dips, or stops for a breather as the drums pound from the first note to last, the guitar riffs are heavy and dream like, while the vocals of Matthew Baty constantly toe the line between a man possessed and about to lose his voice, to sheer anger.

After the mammoth opener, the band create the “normal” length ‘Sweet Relief’ which is pure heavy stoner majesty. Same pounding drums, heavy riffs, agonising vocals, condensed under five minutes, you know it’s a monstrous song when it tightens its grip on your windpipe until you start turning blue. Feed the Rats is only three tracks long, but with the 1st and 3rd tracks hitting over 30 minutes combined, it’s a fair amount, especially when the colossus of ‘Icon’ begins to slay away at your speakers, what little energy remains in you quickly gets burned up in the smoke haze filled waves of purple and green that spin towards you with every word and riff Pigs(x7) layer on top of the last. 

The band are all the good kinds of claustrophobic, the good kinds of sweaty sleaze, the highs from the drugs, the ringing from the burst ear drums, and the blood from your broken nose. Many people will have said this before of the band, and many will to come, but, yes yes yes yes yes yes yes!

(Oh, and that's some sweet ass artwork too! The vinyl comes as a die-cut and the coloured insert is inter-changeable with the figure on the front)

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Sunday Sludge: Khünnt - "Dead Eyes"

Apparently there's nothing wrong at the neighbor's house. I could've testified to hearing someone being brutalized just across the driveway considering the screams and chaos emerging from an unpinned source. That's the problem with any decent pair of headphones. I find myself ripping out the buds and pausing for fifteen seconds to make sure there isn't some primitive beast darting up my stairs. Even if the old dude next-door enjoys the company, I still feel like a tool for my 1:00am visit to ask if he's been stabbed.

As it turns out, Newcastle's Khünnt were the source of confusion. The off-shot bloody Barbie doll being clawed to shreds was the band's vocals. Two tracks on Dead Eyes chew up thirty-six painfully awesome minutes and, depending on your pain threshold, can prove to be either the best or the worst half-hour of your day. Soiling everything with a medieval meld of sludge, drone, doom, and noise, Khünnt deliver a crushing couplet of dried blood and cracked femurs.

Boiling down to a simple Side A and Side B format, these songs celebrate misery and misanthropy. There's no good son / bad son dynamic to be found; these sordid "experimentations" burn with malice aforethought. Side A, numbing with a long-opening Peterbilt rumble, screech and hum just long enough to nurse hope before an agonizingly slow smoke-soaked descent. Burning fuzz saturates the ice-pick barbs, riffs are too fucking gargantuan to trivialize in a wordy weekly column, and rhythms drop like a slow-motion jump from a jagged cliff. Watch your footing, dipshit. If the fall doesn't kill you, the anaphylactic shock and peeling flesh will. At times we're drowning in drone. At others there's one lost vocal crying out for another, eyeless and stunned stupid. A drumkit is flattened behind an endless reel of mayhem, while listeners are more than a little troubled.

Side B is at once the album's more malevolent and more merciful number. Rusty chains and glowing eyes decorate this hollow corridor, poking and bleeding out a bleak streak promised on Side A. Scorching guitar squeals, frayed strings, and a dance with crashing planes are just a few highlights among the swells of feedback. Call it cockeyed sludge-doom intoxication, buried tempos choke on loosened earth and dive headfirst into an archaic violation of the innocent. Riffs outlast the drone, but that commanding vocal torment again gives pause. The quickest of churns emerges only briefly, giving in and immediately going knees-to-sky for the heavy drone element at track's end. The squelch acts as the final snuff in a series of death-rattle gasps, closing the record and extinguishing the agony.

I'm shaking my head. The sounds merge and split and splinter, leaving listeners with no road map on what to expect. Through and through, Dead Eyes is relentless and crushing, drawing out fears through means of improvisational extraction. Recommended for listeners with a strong stomach, this sludge goes a step or two beyond just being dirty; this is disassociative clamor rupturing your insides with a carving fork. I'm not telling you to ignore your instincts and assume the din is Khünnt's doing, I'm simply saying you may need to leave on your nightlight.

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