The ordained Bacon of Industrial music Raymond Watts’ <PIG> is back on with a completely new album. Earlier this year The Lord of Lard blessed us with a vision of things to come on The Diamond Sinners EP. The title track of which opens new album The Gospel: a daring and dirty, funky and flirtatious album to bag. It’s groovy baby and the twenty-eight year old project is probably one of the coolest things to come out this year.
Industrial music has been applied to any artist that mainly programs their sound (it’s possibly a generational thing) but the fusion of samples, synths and synergy from Watts is an organic alien when compared to todays Industrial groups. Where focusing on depth and complexity through its detailed layers the album creates powerful dynamics that move with a well greased conviction in contrast.
That’s to be expected however. PIG has been making music officially since the fall of the great new romantics. Drastically altering the intention of pop music and giving substance to the vacuous pretense of art vs. machine. Raymond Watts didn’t do all of this alone and his pork-rind-cowboys by proxy return to help redefine what they helped to start with the acceptance of electronics in the mainstream alternative music scene.
Sure enough En Ensch and Guenter Schulz of KMFDM fame are long-time collaborators with Raymond. It’s perhaps uncanny that The Gospel harks back to that sexy nineties cyberpunk inspired sound. However also joining the hogs of war is Z. Marr and Mark Thwaite both previously of Combichrist and both very active in the alternative scene. Making the reincarnation of Pig a veritable super group of sounder talent.
Heady and heretical The Gospel and its disciples explore a lot of musical territory, from blues, punk and funk but mainly to rock, stylishly amalgamating them under the common guise of electronic fornication. You’ve got a lot of adventure coming out from the seventies and eighties and PIG takes that experience unto deliverance. You can’t do that on stage anymore.
Idiomatic the instrumentation completes a surreal orgy through Gammon and Pinkel, where the synths gate and glide just as well as the guitars. Augmented by the vocal styling of The Lard himself singing hogannas to the tune of badness. Pig is as versatile as its namesake.
9/10
