Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs
Death Hilarious
MISSING PIECE
Let’s hear it for Death Hilarious’s ridiculously awesome cover art. A vibrant explosion of colorful violence, rendered in a quasi-irezumi art style, the melange of animals and skeletons ripping each other to shreds perfectly captures Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs’ vibe: fierce, thrilling, and brutally enjoyable.
The stoner-metal five-piece have a knack for turning gloom into feral entertainment, a recurring theme within this subgenre. The heady, blues-laden riffs of even the most savage stoner-rock bands are designed with the sole purpose of making you bang your head and get gloriously wasted on whatever poison you prefer. This ability to turn murky music about Satan and drugs into escapist thrills speaks volumes to the origin of many of the genre’s British greats, who generally hail from ex-industrial cities or sleepy rural towns. Black Sabbath were forged in the steel mills of Birmingham, Iron Monkey in the Midlands factory city of Nottingham, while Electric Wizard call a southern coastal town with a population of 15,000 home. Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, meanwhile, dwell in the northern port city of Newcastle.
A whole book could be written about UK doom metal and the conditions that birthed it. The point is used here to illustrate the tone and mood that Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs conjure up with their fifth studio album. Death Hilarious is another collection of pummeling, heavy thrills, the sound of grimy darkness being warped via hammer and tong into something transcendently fun. Nowhere is this better realized than on the seven-minute album centerpiece “The Wyrm.” The epic track’s opening two minutes are a crash of drum fills and a simple riff repeated until it becomes trance-inducing. Once this holy mountain has been scaled, its explorers break through the firmament into a bouncy stoner-rock rager.
“The Wyrm” may be Death Hilarious’s strongest song, though not quite the most singular. That accolade goes to “Glib Tounged,” an evil, midtempo rumbler that features an unexpected rapped verse by Run the Jewels’ El-P. This guest feature teeters on the edge of incongruous, but El is such a domineering presence that he grasps the bass riff’s meter and squeezes so tightly that its eyes practically burst from its head.
Elsewhere, it’s mostly business as usual for Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs—repetitive, fuzz-stacked riffs overlaid with vocalist Matt Baty’s filthy, echoing yell. The only major shake-ups are that the majority of these tracks run under five minutes, which surprisingly does no harm to the band’s hypnotic qualities, and the absence of more eclectic, atmospheric fare in the vein of “The Weather Man” from their previous album, 2023’s Land of Sleeper. This is Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs at their most straightforward and cutthroat: nine tracks that assault you with the single-minded fury of the phantom animals adorning the record’s cover.
