Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – Land Of Sleeper

Abrasive yet euphoric, excoriating guitars’ rough scuzzy contours underpin the Newcastle outfit’s wired and vivid fourth album

Back in the early 1990s, Therapy? were the metal band it was OK for Select readers to enjoy. They turned out a petty strong bunch of grinding industrial rock tunes, but they snuck them under the indie radar by having sensible haircuts, making jokes about James Joyce instead of Jeffrey Dahmer, and eschewing the umlaut for the question mark. Tiny changes, on the face of it, but enough for Therapy? to find themselves on CD shelves next to Curve and Echobelly.

Thankfully, metal and general sonic heaviness are far more acceptable to your average consumer nowadays, but anybody who’s seen a show over the past decade by Newcastle’s Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – and we hereby give notice we’re not typing that lot out again – will notice that they still look different from their psych-doom-stoner peers: baseball caps and Bermuda shorts in place of leathers and cowls, barefoot cavorting in place of hair-swaying and messianic shape-throwing. If there were still such a thing as the alternative mainstream, Pigs would be the heavy band most likely to be accepted by it.

Which is all very well, but all on the surface. A jokey name and the odd spangly shirt might make Pigsx7 atypical, but when it comes to producing intense weighty noise, there’s nothing wry or ironic about them, and fourth album Land Of Sleeper might be their chunkiest offering yet. The gloriously named Ultimate Hammer sets the scene, a filthy ultra-chug which is Blue Cheer without a hint of the blues or a whole lot of cheer, which suddenly slows to a crawl like a snail whose Benylin martinis have just kicked in. The switch to this Sabbather-than-thou trudge turns a heavy rock blast into an entity with its own gravitational pull, and when the tempo picks up again, a buzzing whining lead line smacks you across the face like you’ve just got into a bar brawl with a mechamosquito.

A similar method is used on Big Rig, which opens with the bellowed lines “There is a sphere of burning tar, it’s all around/ Everyone in this god-forsaken English town/ Have washed away its filthy residue each day/ But like a mould it grows ensuring our decay”, like a depressed cross between HP Lovecraft and John Betjeman, before dropping down into The Valley of the Sluggish Riff. This time, there’s more of a tension between the immovable object of a half-tempo groove, and the irresistible force of a headlong amphetamine rush. It’s like listening to a band that can’t decide whether it’s Eyehategod or Motörhead, so has decided to be both alternately.

Not every track plays the same trick (though it’s a bloody good one, and you’ll be glad to be the patsy every time the ruse is pulled): The Weatherman is a mystical, ritualistic chant, which just gets more solemnly sacramental the more ideas get thrown at it over nearly seven minutes; and Terror’s Pillow builds its onslaught on a dinky nursery rhyme figure played on a pair of egregiously distorted strings. But, no matter how often the music pulls back to something more spacious, like the telegraph-wire bass rumble half-way through Atlas Stone, it’s only a matter of time before the vast guitars come lumbering back, their rough scuzzy contours having roughly the same excoriating effect as a quick jog in a pair of pumice-stone jodhpurs. Abrasive yet euphoric, Pigsx7 continue to supply the world with wired and vivid records – “What a time to be alive”, as Ultimate Hammer would have it.