Review: Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - Land of Sleeper
Is the Geordie porcine psych-rock quintet's fourth LP canny?
Apologies to anybody who has been waiting on baited breath for a newsletter. Life has recently overtaken me and I made the decision to be more discerning and to only send out good stuff I’d had the time to put my heart into rather than just turning out any old shite on a Friday.
Aren’t you grateful?!
I got to listen to the new Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs album before its release today and since the album review is dead as a format (with a few notable exceptions), I thought I’d indulge myself with a bit of memoir in this.
It might surprise people to learn this about a boring bastard like me, but a huge part of my life over the past decade is the fact that I was in a heavy metal band. I even had hair down to my chest.
We weren’t particularly big, but we released two albums and a few EPs, drank a load of booze, played some good festivals, drank some more, toured the UK a few times and barely broke even, drank so much at a gig in Edinburgh that I forgot how to even press the strings down on my bass, had more drummers than Spinal Tap (five in five years), and made good friends with a load of people who were kind enough to say nice things about us and our music despite the fact that our swansong turned out to be a song called “Run Out of Fucks”.
Initially I was very ambitious, but eventually content to have carved a niche for ourselves within an ascendant scene of London bands.
It’s now been more than four years since I played my bass, and before moving house last summer I hadn’t even seen it in three years. I had to search Elephant Tree’s packed rehearsal room in the hope that it was still there. Being in a silly little band is what led me to falling in love with the process of releasing music, which in turn led to my former career which saw me working at major labels with massive bands - including our biggest influence in Black Sabbath.
We were a ramshackle outfit with members based in different parts of the UK, but for a while we had some stability through the fact that our drummer, Chris West, was also in another band. He was a drummer, of course he was in more than one band.
It meant we would all meet at his place in St Albans and have a boozy weekend whenever we needed to rehearse, gig, record, or all three.
So many huge memories in my life come from my time in St Albans, even though it was probably only a period of about 2 years. It’s a beautiful town with a frankly embarrassingly huge amount of incredible pubs.
We were drinking in the garden one lovely summer’s evening when we heard the pub next door cheering Greg Rutherford, Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah’s gold medals at London 2012. I can’t think of the Beastie Boys without thinking of St Albans either, since it was in Chris’s living room that we learned of MCA’s death. I’d even see one of our band’s extended family get arrested in the town.
It was also in Chris’s living room that I learned about the band with the best/worst band name I would ever come across. Chris’s previously mentioned “other band” was the dreadfully-named Trippy Wicked and the Cosmic Children of the Knight, but he was about to be trumped.
One day in his living room in 2012 he held a tiny little pink pig about the size of a peanut M&M in the palm of his hand. It had been made out of the false gum that dentists use. Chris told me that he’d got it the previous week when he had been at a gig with a new band from up north called Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs.
While we were playing Sabbath-influenced music in front of people wearing black band t-shirts who were out for a night on the cider, Pigsx7 existed in a parallel world playing Sabbath-influenced music in front of PhD candidates and people who listened to NEU!
Seeing Pigsx7 enjoy success beyond the confines of the stoner-doom continuum in the years since has always been a thrill. A band that’s playing RIFFS via TONES getting played in the day on 6Music? Incredible. And in so many ways inspiring for anyone creating music in any kind of sub-genre that with the right strategy and a fair wind anything is possible.
In an article last week for The Quietus about why music from England’s North East is so often overlooked, author Alex Niven described Pigsx7 as excelling at “awkward bastardry”, and it’s laser-guided in its accuracy as a description of the band.
Since they’re from an apparently far-flung region of the UK, Pigsx7 have always felt like outsiders in a London-centric UK heavy psych scene. Not that they would care in the slightest - being seen as being different is the inherent condition for Geordies. Their music is loved and the fact that they’re outsiders in a world of outsiders enhances the music’s character within the eyes of this world’s audience.
With their fourth album, ‘Land of Sleeper’, Pigsx7 have broken free of any type of scene that they might have once been a part of. Yes, you can hear who their influences are, but on this album you hear a band that’s standing on its own two feet, that doesn’t sound like it belongs to a certain community of contemporary bands in the same way their previous albums did.
The biggest and best bands outgrow their goldfish bowls, and the porcine quintet have shown that with enormous momentum behind them they are achieving critical mass and attracting more and more followers into their orbit.
Like a comet pulling bodies in its trail behind it, Pigsx7 are now pulling their community and extended family behind them, with Bonnacons of Doom vocalist Kate Smith along with Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington providing backing vocals on “The Weatherman”.
‘Land of Sleeper’ welcomes the listener into a world that is entirely belonging to Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. This is the realisation of a decade’s work, and their best album yet.