Noise Pollution #9: God is War in Springtime

It was in the spring of 2011, near Easter (which Google tells me was late that year), and my life was an absolute fucking wreck. I had lost nearly every penny I had in the recession and my home that I inherited when my mother died had been foreclosed on. The home, to add insult to injury, was burglarized a few weeks prior by someone who tore the medicine cabinets apart and ran off with my guitars and game systems. In short, I’d seen better days. As I was trying to pack up the remains of my house, mostly under the cover of darkness as I was technically trespassing, and using any change I found to buy a pack of Mavericks and an apple a day I was contacted by a friend telling me he found me a job and told me when and where to show up. That’s how I ended up working at the record store.

It’s a pretty decent metaphor, being pulled back into the world of reality in the early spring right around the corner from a holiday whose root is rebirth and all that. I’d previously worked at two other record stores, one a local indie with a reputation for selling bongs in the front and later meth out of the back and the other being the corporate juggernaut of the ’90s, The Wall, where my boss would come in still drunk from the night before and yell at me. Would this be the third unlucky instance of hating a job or would my luck finally change? It didn’t matter at the time, it was income and an escape from my life falling apart around me.

There were two locations at the time, one on the Ocean City boardwalk that was half surf related horseshit and half record store (all free from the wonders of climate control) and other being a half filled storefront in the one local mall that still had some traffic in it. I started at the boardwalk store, mostly cleaning it up for the season and selling tourists with their shit traps constantly agape shirts that parodied the “Life is Good” brand that was popular with white, middle aged annoyances, called “Life is Crap.” Funny, right? About as funny as a puppy mill fire.

Eventually, life started to have a little more color to it instead of the weird bluish haze I’d been living with for a few years. I was even able to start smoking Camels again, forsaking Mavericks, which was a pretty big paradigm shift. I started finding my footing and through that I started getting interested in the things I used to love, mostly music. Being surrounded by it meant that I was able to check out certain things in a more traditional way (I was still averse to YouTube, etc.) and was more open about it. Time passed on and later that summer a record caught my eye based on the cover alone: All Pigs Must Die‘s monster God is War. It helped set the table for the second half of the year which was all about rebuilding my life from years of poor mental health, drugs and financial collapse.

God is War is a fucking beast, one of the heaviest records of the last few decades with a weight not only in sound but substance, plus it has one of my favorite cover images of all times.

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Considered to be somewhat of a “supergroup” since the members come from various monoliths of dark hardcore, All Pigs Must Die, alongside Nails, really launched Southern Lord out of just being a doom (or, briefly, a black metal) label, and this newly forged identity helped push some of my favorite records of hardcore and crust out into a larger audience, but, for my money, none of them touched “APMD.” They were like a liferaft thrown to me while I was drowning in a sea of my own creation.

Two years later, I found myself managing the record store and in a much better place physically and mentally (financially can be debated). It also found the release of the second All Pigs Must Die record, Nothing Violates This Nature. While God is War focused mostly on being the most pummeling metallic hardcore record possible, Nothing Violates This Nature is a more genre fluid affair, with notes of black metal permutating yet another heavy fucking Kurt Ballou production job.

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Time passed on the way it tends to do and by the time All Pigs Must Die released their third album, Hostage Animal, the life I was living when I first came across God is War was unrecognizable to the one I was living in 2017, and like how I’d changed, so too had All Pigs Must Die. Hostage Animal is a much rawer affair than the two prior, and even held a slight tone of melancholy to it if you listened closely enough.. or maybe it didn’t and I was hearing what I wanted to. Either way, this was another stellar release of dark and metallic hardcore that meshed genres together in such an organic manner that you’d hardly notice different influences because the intensity of the record doesn’t give you that kind of room to breathe.

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And so here we are, five years later and 11 since this tale started. In 2018 I was able to finally see All Pigs Must Die live at Strange Matter, the legendary Richmond club that shut down not long after, all but severing the vein that carried these size shows into the city. It remains one of the best shows I’ve ever had the chance to witness, and probably one of a handful of the last shows I’ve seen in the last few years. The band has continued to remain important to me, and I named God is War one of my ten favorite records of the decade in a piece elsewhere that isn’t difficult to Google. There’s something about this band (that album in particular) that just really hits home for me, from their sonics to their aesthetics. I continually missed it every time the hoodie with the cover was reissued, so consider this my official petition for the design to return.

Half a decade and nary a rumble of a new record. Sure there are a few other EPs I didn’t mention, and they’re all worth checking out, but beyond that it’s been quiet. That’s not unusual in dark, negative hardcore. Most of the bands that tickle my fancy are all a little slow to release follow ups. I’m sure we’ll get to all of them here eventually, but these are all bands who, if they decided they were finished, have left some incredible catalogs of work behind. But as it gets warmer, my thoughts will remain in springtime, only I’m thinking of one specific spring 27 years ago. We’ll talk soon, I’m sure.

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