For those who find Sabbath too soft, Killing Joke too kitschy and The Melvins too milquetoast, there’s Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. The surprisingly clean and well-groomed Newcastle Upon Tyne quintet pulverize their competitors — not to mention their forebears, followers and pretty much everybody else within hearing distance — with a brand of aggressively hypnotic, grimly detuned, relentlessly plodding steamroller doom-fuzz that lands somewhere between sludge-metal, stoner-rock and performance art. Though it must be said their sophomore album King of Cowards, while definitely not for the squeamish, is easily their most accessible work to date — if only because these songs average a mere seven minutes each, unlike the 15-minute death-march riff-fest monoliths of their debut album. Thankfully, amid all this rampant pop-chart commerciality, they haven’t sacrificed the near-total incomprehensibility of their frontman’s Viking war-cry bellowing. Nor have they given in to the temptation to write anything as enjoyable as a chorus, refrain or hook. So you needn’t worry about having to share this with the masses anytime in the foreseeable future. Though it is something you may want to share with your therapist.
