Pig Destroyer - deathgrindunleashed!

Thu 5th Jul, 2007 in Features

The new album for US deathgrind band Pig Destroyer, Phantom Limb was released mid-June on Relapse. Three years in the making, the new album showcases 14 new tracks in just 30 minutes or so, and is just as brutal as ever.

FasterLouder contributor Leticia Supple caught up with vocalist JR Hayes this week to chat about the band, their directions, and more particularly about Phantom Limb.

FL:First up let me congratulate you on the new album because it really is excellent. I really enjoyed it. Before we discuss it, could you tell me a bit about Pig Destroyer, and what the highlights have been for you over the past ten years or so?

JR:Well, I don’t know, there’s been a lot. I mean, we’ve put out some records that we’re real proud of. We’ve been lucky enough to have a label like Relapse to support us for the last six or seven years, and we’ve been fortunate enough to play with a lot of great bands from all types of genres. You know, everybody from Whitehouse to Napalm Death, to Dethroned and Unsane. I think a big highlight for me was going to Japan. They asked us to come to Japan and play with Anal Cunt and Nasum and Napalm Death, and we got to open that tour and play with some great Japanese bands like 324 and Disgust. And it really doesn’t get much cooler than that.

FL:Your music has been described as heavy and insane; as violent and brutal; as bludgeoning grindcore. How would you describe your brand of deathgrind to someone who’s not familiar with your work?

JR:Um, I don’t know. I think that any tag that involves – œbrutal’ is okay with me. Laughs. I mean that’s what we’re going for. We just wanna try to make the most intense and heavy music that we can, and most of all make it sound like it’s completely pissed off. Coz to me that’s where a lot of metal falls short, you know, you’ve got great production and these huge riffs and everything but there’s just no anger there. I’ve always been such a big fan of the early American hardcore bands like Negative Approach, and Minor Threat, um, D.R.I., you know, and it’s important for us to kinda capture that pissed-off intensity, the punk intensity, and kinda bring that in to the metal as well, you know?

FL: I notice on Phantom Limb there’s really no breathing space at all, on the album, and not having seen you guys it made me wonder if that’s what your shows are like as well. Like, is it just full on the whole time?

JR:We try to make it full on the whole time. We’re getting a little older and a little slower you know, in our age, so we have to take a couple of minutes extra between songs just to huff and puff and, you know, cough out the blood. When we play songs, we try to play – œem twice as fast as they are on the record. It’s just about that intensity. You know, you got the alcohol in you, and you’re just going for it. That’s what makes this kinda music great. You don’t get that kind of adrenaline rush by playing, you know, indie rock.

FL:Your early days were embedded in a socio-political consciousness, in which I believe is also where your name sort of comes from. Of course, grindcore as a genre is often thematically concerned with politics of some kind, whether that’s religious politics or whatever. Through successive albums you’ve tended to move away from that a bit. Has this been a natural evolution for you?

JR:Uh, for me it has. I mean, back when I wrote those early songs I was a lot younger and more idealistic, not quite as cynical as I am now. It’s not that I don’t want to write political songs, it’s just that when I, sit down to write I’m kind of a slave to the pen, and you’ve gotta go with what your muse says, what your inspiration says. That’s just not the angle that I’ve been taking for the last couple of records. I wouldn’t say that I’ll never write another political song, but it’s not a conscious decision. These are the lyrics that come out when I sit down with my book, you know?

FL:The albums Terrifyer and Prowler in the Yard both received universally positive attention, and Terrifyer in particular got rave reviews. Were you daunted by the prospect of doing another album after receiving such acclaim?

JR:Not really because, well for two reasons. Me personally, I try to exist in a bubble. I don’t go on the internet and you know, look at all the stuff that’s being said about my band, or whatever. I mean, occasionally I’ll see a review or something and I’m really glad that they’re usually good. But I just try to stay focused on just making the music and trying to improve. You know, the other guys in the band work so hard on improving themselves on their instruments. Scott’s being playing guitar for twenty years and he’s started taking lessons again. I mean, that’s the kinda guy that he is, he wants to step it up every time, and I feel like I have to do that too. So we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to try to make the next album better. I think that we all believe that the next album we do is gonna be better than this one. I don’t think there’d be any reason to do it if there wasn’t.

FL:It’s well publicised that you don’t have a bass player. People keep asking me whether in fact you use a session bassist, because of how heavy the bottom-end of your sound is, particularly on Phantom Limb, and I’m not qualified to answer that question. I keep telling them – œno’. Can you help me out? Do you use a session bassist?

JR:Laughs. No, no. Well sometimes when we do a slower song or we do a cover song we’ll have somebody play bass, but that’s very rare. For the new album what we ended up doing was, we have several guitar tracks on the record, and we were all just in the studio and we were all drunk and we started messing around with some things, and we took one of the guitar tracks and we pitch-shifted it down, like, a whole octave. And Scott’s already tuned down to, like, A, so I don’t even know what an octave below that would be, but it sounded really heavy. And it kind of even sounds like a bass, you know? But it’s not a bass. But we tried out bass players in the past and maybe we just haven’t found that person that really fits the chemistry of the band. But it’s not a big deal for us. We’ve always had pretty much the line-up that we have, so it’s really not a foreign concept to us. It’s just foreign to other people.

FL: That’s right. It’s like, there were some people sitting listening to Phantom Limb with me, and they were like, – œhear that? I can hear bass in that’. And I’m like, – œno, there’s no fucking bass there!’

JR:Laughs

FL:I suppose the next question then is probably fairly obvious. You expanded your trio to include synth/noise artist Blake fairly late in the piece. Can you tell me about your decision to bring Blake in, what happened, and why you chose him rather than a bassist—which I suppose you’ve pretty much covered?

JR:Well, we never felt like we were ever not a whole band. And I think that other people look at us and they see that we don’t have a bass player, and they think that we’re only seventy-five per cent of a band. And it’s really like, the three-legged dog is still a dog. I mean, that’s just the way that we’ve always been. We could’ve added a bass player very easily, but the idea of having somebody there to do noise and samples was a little more exciting to us, in that it seemed a bit more open-ended, like we could do more with it. With a bass player you pretty much know what a bass player’s gonna do: he’s gonna play bass. When we added Blake to the band we just wanted to add a little extra atmosphere to what was going on, but we didn’t want to change the entire sound of what we were doing. And, you know, actually the last time that we tried out a bass player I was late to practice. And I’m coming downstairs and I hear – œem playing a song, and I’m like – œman, that sounds pretty heavy’, like, – œwhat the hell are they playing?!’ And then I got in the room and I realise that they were playing one of our songs. And I was like, – œman, this doesn’t even sound like us anymore’. Laughs. So, we like the way that our band sounds and we didn’t really want to try and change it completely. We just wanted to add a little extra spice to the mix, you know?

FL:Yeah, which is what actually works really well on the new album.

JR:Unfortunately we didn’t add Blake until we were almost done writing the material for the new album, but you know, in the live situation it definitely helps out a lot because it adds a whole – œnother layer of mood to what we’re doing. Especially between songs, you know? We can run samples and fuck with people’s heads a little bit.

FL:Which also gives you that breather you mentioned earlier.

JR:Oh yeah. Yeah, I definitely need some time to get some air in the lungs.

FL:Apparently you took a bit of a different tack with the recording of Phantom Limb. Could you give me a bit of a rundown on that?

JR:Well in the past we’ve saved up every cent that we could, to try to buy the best equipment we could. You know, the best guitar equipment, and we got Brian a custom drum set, and we bought all these expensive microphones. We’ve always kind of done everything ourselves as far as the production side of it. But we always had problems recording the drums, just because the practice basement is just, like, a basement in a house. It’s not really designed for recording. So this time we were like, alright we’re going to go into a really nice studio, and we’re just gonna try to get a good drum sound. And, you know, we booked five days in the studio. We showed up, it only took us three days to record the whole album, it was done, and then we had two days to drink and screw around.

FL:Wicked.

JR:Yeah, and you know, because we recorded everything so well at the beginning, it really made the production stage a lot easier because the sounds were already closer to what we wanted.

FL:I’ve read some reviews for the new album which are a mixed bag but generally positive. Some critics are concerned the album highlights a move toward commerciality, even though it’s so brutal and crushing, which is probably to do with the greater usage of riffs. Can you tell me about some of that? What would your response to those critics be?

JR:My response to the critics would be to completely ignore them, laughs, because that’s kinda what I’ve always done. I realised a long time ago that no matter what you do or how good you think it is, there’s always gonna be somebody who thinks it sucks. Everybody’s got their opinion, obviously. And that’s fine. To say that we’ve gone in a more commercial direction? I mean, I can see how people would say that, and maybe it is a justifiable criticism, but it wasn’t a conscious decision on our part. I mean, what we wanted to do was just write better songs, instead of just having these piles of riffs, where you just take a bunch of cool riffs and throw – œem together and presto! you have a song. We tried to think a little more about repeating certain parts and really trying to expand our song-writing to make the songs more memorable, more interesting. Some people would say more – œcatchy’, I mean that’s kind of a bad word coz it makes it sound like I’m writing pop songs, but I think there was a conscious effort to make the album more memorable, to where each song was more memorable, as opposed to just having certain riffs or certain parts that were cool, you know? We wanted the listener to be able to take a song out of the context of the record and still have it be a good song by itself. And maybe we accomplished that, maybe we didn’t. Those people who don’t like it, hopefully they can still listen to the old records and be happy, you know?

FL:Lyrically, I found the album to be really poetic and savagely beautiful. Many grind bands are just content with blood and guts and gore and not many actually do it in style. How does the writing work for you, and are there any masters to which you aspire?

JR:I’m always writing stuff. A lot of things that I write I don’t even write with the intention of them being songs, they’re just thoughts or, you know, me scribbling down whatever. And I just like to have a stockpile of stuff. Like, if it comes time to make a record and I haven’t filled up a whole journal yet then I get kinda scared, coz I’m afraid I’m not gonna have enough material. But for me, I don’t look at metal as something like that the lyrics are expendable. Just because people can’t understand what I’m saying doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be saying something worth anything. I think that no matter what kind of music you play you can still be artful, and poetic, and all those things. My lyrical influences range way outside of metal. Vocally most of my inspiration comes from metal bands and punk bands, but lyrically I’m bringing stuff from rap and country and all sorts of other things that I enjoy, and I’m just trying to integrate that into what I do.

FL:One thing that I read noted that the lyrics on the new album give us a vision of the filthy love that a killer feels for his prey. That the victims are torn apart but pined for, savaged but eulogised. And that rings really true for me as well, I find that. And tracks like the last couple, like, Girl in the Slayer Jacket for instance, and uh Machete Twins with its female savagery, kind of depart from that. Um, can you talk a bit about the conceptual or thematic underpinnings of the album? Like, was it on purpose and did you start out to hang it together in a particular way, and if possible, how come there are a couple that are such a diversion from the rest of what you’ve written?

JR:I think as a writer, or even as a band, you’re always trying to walk that line between expanding your sound and evolving, incorporating new things. But at the same time, you don’t wanna lose sight of what your band is in the first place. And that’s a hard thing to do sometimes. I don’t wanna be in the type of band that puts out the same album over and over and over again. But at the same time, we’re not gonna do a reggae album, you know what I mean? Still, it’s a tough line to walk and I think lyrically I feel the same way. Like, I could sit and write a certain thing that’s kind of within the framework of what I do, but I like to try to mix it up and do some different things sometimes. Girl in the Slayer Jacket was one of those songs, I don’t know, that one kind of came together pretty quickly. And I was kind of unsure about it. I think even Scott was unsure about it. He’s like, – œOh I don’t know about this one dude’. But I felt strongly about it. I think I kinda liked it just because it was different. And that was my main goal with this album: that every song didn’t have to fit within some sort of a overall concept. I kinda wanted it to be fourteen individual songs, and make each song the best that I could, as opposed to thinking too much about the whole album, as one piece, you know?

FL:The artwork is really lovely as well. And you could almost take it at face value in its complexity. You know, like I work with a lot of really Christian, really pop-oriented people, and I’ve had the album just kind of laying around on my desk. And I’ve had people pick it up and go, – œOh I’ve never seen this band before.’

JR:Laughs.

FL:And not really realising that it’s a dead chick and she’s holding a severed limb and all this sort of thing. What can you tell me about the artwork? Like, how was it conceived, and did it take you long to get what you were after?

JR:The artwork was one of the more difficult things to put together for this record. I feel like the music came together pretty easily, but then when it came to the artwork and the layout, it was a little more difficult. Because, you know John [John Baizley], he did the painting, and I’ve always loved his art because he has that understanding of the perverse beauty that I like. You’ve gotta mix the beauty together with the ugliness to make it real. He’s always had that element to his stuff. What I like about his art is that it looks really beautiful when you first look at it, and you’re like – œoh this is nice’, and it’s psychedelic and whatever. And if you stare at it for a little bit you start to see that the dark portions of it will kind of seep out. There’s a little more to it than just a swirling, flowery mess, you know?

FL:Yeah, that’s right. You know, like there’s maggots under the flowers.

JR: Exactly, exactly. That dark element is still there, it’s just a little more subtle. It doesn’t jump out at you immediately like some of the other records that we did, like Prowler. But when he did the art you know, he sent us what was originally supposed to be the cover and then the back cover, it was like a wrap-around type of thing. And we were all really happy with it, but it was so complex and so dense that there wasn’t really anywhere to put text. You know, we’re like, shit, where are we gonna put the song titles, and the fucken band logo, and everything. So it took a little while for us to figure out what we were gonna do, and luckily Orien, the guy who does the art for Relapse, he helped us out at the last minute. He threw some stuff together with the band photos that made us really happy, and I think it turned out pretty good.

FL:Yeah, it’s excellent. You guys stated a while back that you would release a series of nine 7” EPs last year, featuring bands like Australia’s own grinders Blood Duster on the flipside. Which were put on hold for Phantom Limb. Are they back on the cards now?

JR:what happened was that we started writing stuff for the seven inches, and we were really happy with the songs we were writing, but we knew that we were going too slow. And it had already been almost two years since the last album. We were like, shit, by the time we get around to doing the album it’s gonna be like three or four years. So we kinda switched gears and said let’s do the album and get that out of the way, and then after the album’s out we can kind of concentrate on these more. To us the split thing has always been more like a friends kind of thing. You want to do splits with bands that you’ve toured with, or that you love. So those ideas are back on the table now, but I don’t think we’re gonna do them as a series. I think we’re gonna kind of take – œem one at a time. We’re looking right now at doing a split seven inch or ten inch with Rotten Sound, so I think that’s gonna be the next thing on our agenda.

FL:What does the immediate future hold for Pig Destroyer?

JR:I would like to see us get out and play some shows in some places we’ve never been. I’d like to get back to Europe ,and of course get out to Australia and maybe back to Japan, but we’ve just always moved kind of slow. We don’t play a lot of shows, so when we do play – œem we try to make – œem count. We just try to take it one step at a time, you know. Right now we’re planning on a couple of US shows later this month, and Scott’s got a kid on the way so we’re gonna be sidelined for a little bit. And hopefully later this year we can come out and start playing some more shows and writing some more songs. We’ve got a new member now, so I’m really excited about writing some new material with him in the band, and I’m really excited to see where that’s gonna go.

FL: Which brings me to my last question, which you’ve kind of already addressed, which is when are you guys going to come to Australia and tear our houses down out here?

JR:Laughs. Hopefully sooner than later. I mean Australia’s on the top of my list of places to go. But our band’s a democracy, and we’re going to have to see what happens.