PIG’s career has very much been a performance in two acts: in the mid-90s, Raymond Watts’ post-KMFDM project was in the brink of something special… but the end result was more something sad.
Birthed with collaborations with JG Thirlwell of Foetus, PIG went on to tour as the support for Nine Inch Nails on The Downward Spiral tour in ’94, and release albums on Trent Reznor’s Nothing label, backed by Interscope, then a subsidiary of Warner / Atlantic. And they were massive in Japan. But they were always too weird, too wired, too experimental to have the same kind of appeal as NIN, and were destined to remain on the peripheries occupied by KMFDM and Foetus, instead of storming through to a mass audience. And drugs and shit would see Watts lay low for the best part of a decade following the turn of the millennium.
But, since refreshed and rejuvenated, Watts has been on a roll, pumping out PIG product at a phenomenal rate. And while recent releases have been tinged with an altogether glammier sheen, the old wordplay – in particular porcine puns in abundance and ever-escalating alliterations – aren’t just back, but popping all over like the surface of hunks of crackling.
‘Hurt People Hurt’ lands two years after ‘Red Room’, but in the intervening time there’s been ‘Plato’s Atlantis’ – the backing to the Plato’s Atlantis fashion show – and a couple of remix albums and EPs. In short, Watts certainly hasn’t been scratching around for ideas.
If recent releases haven’t demonstrated the same audacious flair for combining lifts of classical music with gritty industrial guitars, they have seen Watts attain a new consistency. But as soon as I say that, ‘Tosca’s Kiss’, the opener on ‘Hurt People Hurt’ arrives in a flurry of piano before cutting in with grinding guitar and some flamboyant flourishes that are pure vintage PIG.
|
Much of the album is tortured-sounding industrial sludge-trudge, but always with that unique PIG spin. It’s not just Watts’ growling vocals: there’s a specific way in which crazed electronics and dirty guitars come together over thumping beats which is specific to PIG, regardless of their proximity to the Wax Trax! scene and the like. As such, ‘Hurt People Hurt’ doesn’t deviate far from the template of other recent releases, and still marks as clear lineage back to earlier releases, too. And that’s in its favour: it’s a PIG album that sounds like a PIG album, and it’s a good one, with its relentless attack, its low-slung sleaze grind. The title track is a bone fide banger, and not only is ‘Hurt People Hurt’ a crack(l)ing album, it’s PIG on peak form.
|
