When one of the biggest grindcore bands of recent years drops a two-song, 26-minute doom-metal album, you can certainly colour me intrigued. Pig Destroyer actually recorded these two tracks back in ’06 but, understandably, they took some time to see the light of day.
“Mass & Volume” takes up 19 of those minutes, starting off slowly with some droning feedback. In fact, there’s a whole lotta feedback, as it’s several minutes before we get any semblance of a riff… slow, spacious, and hitting like a ton of bricks. Sorta like YOB, but even slower, and perhaps a little less spacey. Vocals are few and far between, but sound more like a black-metal whisper than anything else. Definitely doesn’t sound anything remotely like grindcore, though, I’ll give ‘em that!
“Red Tar,” at six-and-a-half minutes, is much shorter and sludgier, wasting no time in getting down to its doomy business. The repetitive pummelling is broken by a subtle chug that might make Kirk Windstein proud, with a voluminous level of feedback soaring overtop, even ascending above the death-metal vocals. Pretty decent doomy downstrokes dropped in throughout, as well.
Honestly, I’d knock a couple points off this if I didn’t know it was played by a grindcore band—but I’ll definitely give ‘em an A for effort.
Mass & Volume was previously available for a limited time as a digital-only EP with all of the proceeds going to the family of former Relapse Records employee Pat Egan, who tragically passed away last year. The record has been more widely available in physical and digital formats since October 14 (www.relapse.com/pigdestroyermass).
