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First off: short tracks. This is a good sign. With one exception, every track on Book Burner clocks in shy of the three minute mark, several below two minutes and even one minute.
That’s not to say Pig Destroyer’s excursions into more sprawling territory haven’t been successful, even occasionally producing some of their best work. It’s just to say that even though this steakhouse makes great salads, it’s the dog’s bollocks when they make steaks.
The sprawl is absent from more than just song duration. This is the utterly elemental Pig Destroyer of Painter of Dead Girls and 38 Counts of Battery. Gone are the stacks of intertwining guitar and vocal layers, sounding instead very much like a live band, albeit a much better produced one than in their nascence. Scott Hull’s riffs lean toward his classic webs of excoriating complication tempered by hardcore breakdowns. JR Hayes sounds less like a demon and much more like the emotionally exhausted and fraught older gentleman whose interpersonal anger has evolved into a nasty worldview.
That worldview seems to be Hayes’ new lyrical preoccupation, replacing the stylized grindcore murder-ballad he helped perfect. It’s a neat hat trick that enables a band that’s always been more than just another gore-grind band to literally be more than a gore-grind band. But it seems like more than just a gimmick to distance themselves from a limiting sub-genre–Hayes and his bandmates have successfully drawn a through-line from a young man’s heartbreak to an older man’s crustiness by turning away from the horrors of explicitly violent imagery to focus on the horrors of the banal.
It’s hard to talk about lyrical themes with a vocally inscrutable band like Pig Destroyer. They’re perfectly aware of this fact and don’t hide behind it. That’s why the imagery, from the haunting album cover to abstractly evocative song titles like “The Diplomat”, “Valley of the Geysers”, and “The Underground Man” are so important in understanding the underlying story of a Pig Destroyer release. Though Book Burner is certainly no concept album, it’s clearly meant to be interpreted as a logical evolution for a band that cares about what they’re saying, even if they don’t opt to articulate it plainly.
In the end, it’s all there on the album cover, in that young girl’s eyes. She’s terrifying in her plainness. Is she alive or dead? Why are we even asking these questions about a drawing? Because her simple gaze haunts us, just as the simple attack of Pig Destroyer haunts, an assault at once uncomplicated and layered, effortlessly demanding your attention.
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HEAR BOOK BURNER
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Pig Destroyer – “Burning Palm”
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BUY BOOK BURNER
Preorder from iTunes (Digital download)
Preorder from Relapse (CD, LP, cassette, digital download)
Book Burner will be released by Relapse Records on October 22 in the US
. . .
GRIND.
Musically, this album rips——it’s not as trippy or grandiose as their other post-38 Counts stuff, but it hits as hard as anything in their catalog. It’s nice to hear Pig Destroyer work with truncated songs again; Scott Hull is the format’s current master. I was worried that Adam Jarvis would turn in a machine-like performance a la Misery Index, but he plays with audible passion here. It sounds like Hull wrote the drum parts; they’re way different from Jarvis’s other stuff.
Hayes’s lyrics definitely took a hit on this one, though. I don’t mind political lyrics, but he’s not nearly as deft with the subject this time around as he was back in the 38 Counts days. The “look at my scummy life” moments are amusing, but Jay Randall (who Hayes used to be in ANb with) does them better. And occasionally, a line will just flop hard——”automatic porn drug ritual” is a weak refrain, especially given that the rest of “The Bug” has nothing to do with those subjects. Hayes is still head and shoulders above the average, but this one is his weakest contribution to date. Perhaps my expectations were unfairly demanding, though.
“That worldview seems to be Hayes’ new lyrical preoccupation, replacing the stylized grindcore murder-ballad he helped perfect. It’s a neat hat trick that enables a band that’s always been more than just another gore-grind band to literally be more than a gore-grind band. But it seems like more than just a gimmick to distance themselves from a limiting sub-genre–Hayes and his bandmates have successfully drawn a through-line from a young man’s heartbreak to an older man’s crustiness by turning away from the horrors of explicitly violent imagery to focus on the horrors of the banal.”
This paragraph suggests that JR Hayes somehow just broke out of writing plain gore-grind brutality to something more cerebral. If you’ve EVER read his lyrics on ANY release then you know it’s ALWAYS been more cerebral. Any song on Prowler…, Terrifyer, or Phantom Limb have always suggested a psychological horror. Something that gore-grnd eschews on purpose. Maybe this was an erroneous comparison on the reviewer’s part?
To suggest more than a gore-grind band is to place them just outside it with some slight differences. Not true.
Seems like the phrase you ought to be focusing on is “stylized grindcore murder-ballad,” not gore-grind.
Reviewer, here. I’ve certainly done time reading Hayes’ lyrics (he’s one of the few lyricists I still pay attention to, actually). And “cerebral” was your word, not mine. Re-read that passage and you’ll see it’s fairly clear that I was not implying his lyrics were less cerebral before this record.
Duh! You are right! My bad.
The video looks like a bunch of Raymond Pettibon (Black Flag, OFF!, etc.) drawings come to life.
this bands isn’t bad.