Review: Pig Destroyer - “Phantom Limb”

When I first popped this in my CD player, I wasn’t paying %100 attention to what was going on. I could swear there was ten minutes of ultra-fast chaos, and I thought “Damn, for a grind band, they sure can make a fast epic grind song actually work!”. Then I looked at the counter, and it was on track seven. So holy crap, they can jam a whole bunch of fast short songs together and make them seem like one big epic thing.

After a few more listens, I felt like I was listening to the audio equivalent of a trilogy, kind of like Stars Wars, you know, the three first ones? No, the real first three movies, the ones that didn’t suck, and didn’t try to substitute special efforts for things like an actual story, or PLOT.

So the first part of “Phantom Limb” has all those fast cool songs crammed all together, like taking all the cool stuff you have in your bedroom, and putting it in a closet temporarily to hide it because your grandmother will be sleeping in YOUR room. It’s also where the story first gets established, like when Luke sees the Death Star and says “I’ve got a bad feeling about this...”

The middle is where the worst problems in the story are. The music slows down a bit with some samples ripped off from good movies to let you know when a song ends. Near the end of that, you’re faced with a strange revelation, kind of like what Luke says after Darth Vader reveals the awful truth - “You can never be my father!”

The end is where it all ties itself up, and speeds up a bit more towards a climactic ending. Your thrown a few unexpected things, like that guitar flanging thing that sounds like a jet taking off, and it’s like your being set up for an ambush. “Luke, it’s a trap!’

The music itself has drums that sound like the drummer got into a fist fight with some of the band members, and was forced to play as fast as possible or else he’d be beaten with a lead pipe. Except of course for those couple of times when the band just decided to change their mind, and beat with a pipe anyways, and say “I thought I told you to slow it down!” just to find a reason to smack him again.

The vocals sound like they were recorded into a cheap microphone that distorts when people talk too loud into it. The vocalist sounds like he spent the previous night at a bar trying to yell every conversation until his lost his voice, and then severed a vocal chord.

The riffs on the album sound like guitarist was locked in a closet without food for three days, and told he’d better come up with something good, or his family would be killed. In order to come up with some riffs fast, it seems like the guitarist tried to think of all the best riffs he’d ever thought of his entire life, no matter what genre they were. Could be hardcore styled chords, could be 80's thrash, or it could be some dirty old rock ‘n roll. For the recording, he probably tuned up his guitar as fast as he could in fifteen seconds, and beat the crap out of his guitar until all the songs were recorded in one take in the same day, and then he was thrown back in the closest.

The distortion from the guitars sounds like somebody stole an amp from a rock-star wannabes garage, then the thieves walked into a studio and forced the staff to make it sound as good as they could. At gunpoint.

The recording sounds like a studio hostage situation that was recorded in one day, where the recording staff was told they had to do the best recording possible, or else a terrorist organization would kill them when they least expected it. By planting a bomb in every staff members car at some random point in time when they least expected it.

So of course all that together makes for the most kick-ass album I’ve heard all year.

5/5

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