15 May 2020

Spectrum Culture reviews igs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs' Viscerals


They say:

Among the top of the heap for purveyors of skull-rattling, chrome-plated rock.

From the outset, on their krautrocky 2017 debut, Feed the Rats, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs established themselves as a major voice in the current psych-rock revival. The group tightened their jamming for King of Cowards, a record that sounded like an alternate timeline where Lemmy started Motörhead first and poached the members of Hawkwind to back him; the LP confirmed the dual-guitar team of Sam Grant and Adam Ian Sykes as the finest riffmeisters since Matt Pike, blending stoner rock, galloping metal and crushing psychedelia into a focused blast. Viscerals sharpens the band’s songwriting even further, trimming songs down to their most effective, grooving just long enough to hammer in the perfection of their riffs before moving on to the next crushing number.

“Reducer” launches out of the gate with a trad metal drum pattern that quickly explodes into a mid-tempo roar of psych-doom. As one guitar surges through a riff, another lets loose a shrieking lead that hangs over Matt Baty’s bullish vocals. “Ego kills everything,” he barks later in the song, though the philosophical is prefaced by the literal in his earlier screams of “I want air.” Running a breezy four-and-a-half minutes compared to the previous album’s six-minute opener, “Reducer” nonetheless shows off just how tight the band has become, swinging through numerous key and tempo changes, including a seismic, primal concrete sledge breakdown...

Read the rest here: Spectrum Culture

---