You can tell a lot about a person by the company that they keep, or so they say. So, the fact that Raymond Watts, the person behind the Pig name, co-wrote much of this latest album Red Room with Pitchshifter’s Jim Davis, the man in turn responsible for the unique sound of many of The Prodigy’s hits, speaks volumes. As does finding the likes of old KMFDM bandmate Günther Schulz, regular collaborator and jazz trumpeter Enrico Tomasso,plus the likes of Chris Connelly of Revolting Cocks, and Ministry fame, Emily Kavanaugh from Night Club and Stabbing Westward’s own Chris Hall, all lending a helping hand. Great company indeed!
This gathering of the great and good of the industrial and extreme soundscaping world is as good company as you might hope to get, but what does it all add up to? Well, it adds up to one of the best industrial/alt-rock albums of recent times. The songs are, in turn, angular and abrasive, bombastic and beautiful, muscular and menacing. And if the music sounds dark and doom-laden, brooding and brutal, we find Watts, to use his own phrase, “beating a hammer of hope on the anvil of despair.”
As the album kicks off with opener “Crumbs, Chaos & Lies” you realize that compromise is not a word that Watts has any time for; the sonic shards fly and you can almost see the sparks light up the air as brutal beats pummel through the song, as incendiary riffs tear through the creative space, as industrial grooves rip up the landscape. And as a taste of things to come, this sets the tone perfectly. “Sick Man’s Prayer” seems to saunter and lilt towards the listener, “Dirty Mercy” is all about big, raw and raucous riffs whilst being anthemic and abrasive and “Dum Dum Bullet” hits a strange stride between a sort of robotic alt-pop and a gothic post-punk poise.
Then there are songs like “Does It Hurt Yet” which fill the space with liquid electronica, smoother and more spacious than what surrounds it, but it just goes to show that even when working at such extreme ends of the sonic spectrum, there is room for nuance and more subtle approaches.
This is rock music built from the detritus found scattered across an industrial wasteland, all sharp edges and jagged design and driven by a relentless powerhouse of bruising beats and searing sparks. It is the white-hot groove of factory noise being rendered onto the alternative nightclub floor, but not the nightclub that just anyone can find. This one is probably in a decaying warehouse or dead car plant miles away from civilization and possibly even in some parallel universe. As the clock strikes thirteen, this is the sound that hits the sky for what might be the last party before the apocalypse. Who’s in?
Red Room album order
Spotify
Apple Music
Crumbs, Chaos & Lies feat. Alexis Mincolla
