Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – Viscerals
Newcastle harbingers of sludge-rock Pigs x7 go bitesize without sacrificing their unique flavour.
Despite the fact they clearly know their way around a tasty riff, it’s difficult to credit the mainstream successes of Pigs x7 to much other than their daft name, and the semi-ironic devotion it instils in the average BBC 6 Music listener, which grants them an excuse to rediscover their love for Maiden without losing too much credibility at the PTA meeting.
Their latest LP Viscerals, much like its predecessors in style and statement, shows that they’re to be dismissed at one’s own peril. The one-two punch of Reducer and Rubbernecker smarts as much as any burly number we’ve heard from Pigs x7, and New Body and Halloween Bolson offer as much guitar inventiveness as any of the longform songs on 2018’s King of Cowards. Sam Grant and Adam Ian Sykes’ combined fretwork is as engaging as ever, but Matt Baty’s deep-felt lyricism is still easily missed, sounding the changing nature of modern masculinity and substance abuse from under his pained yelp.
The only superficial changes between Pigs x7 releases to date are in track quantity, and mercifully un-qualitative; they’ve gone from mammoth, side-long pseudo-jams to relatively bite-sized chunks without sacrificing any of the fury they’ve harboured from the beginning.
Listen to: Rubbernecker, New Body, Halloween Bolson