Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, OR Pigsx7 launched their North American tour from the Lodge Room in August, staining the sacred planks of the venue with more sweat and abandon than bands are typically used to expelling throughout a set. For those not in the blissful know, Pigs x7 are a beloved heavy band that’s been adopted by the LA psych scene, one able to discharge hallucinatory spores from their pores during their intense performances that induce pure rock and roll rapture. Their songs breakdown the same way your body does when in their crosshairs. And just when you’re completely destroyed and a pile of rubble before them, they find a way to engineer your rock and roll rebirth in their image.
How this crossover from psych to metal took place was a mystery for me and the inspiration that made me trek out to their show in the hopes of catching an earful of insight into what sonic sinew connected their sound to the standard Desert Daze LA hipster. Somewhere between Sabbath worship and The Doors, Pigs x7 managed to straddle the line of two fanbases that, while sharing some DNA, rarely overlap this seamlessly.
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From afar, I figured LA psych’s affinity for Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs came from our hidden desire to be harder and heavier. As much as we like the drippy, chill sounds of the genre’s modern pillar players, even King Gizz headed in a heavier direction- more than once. To embrace them is to admit that psych, at least in LA, has outgrown its paisley bellbottoms and wants fangs, domestic beer, and violence to match its liquid light shows
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Hailing from the UK, it’s no easy feat to catch Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs in Los Angeles. Part of their adoption into the psych scene was Moonblock/Desert Daze’s promotion of their music at fests and shows which gave every local a signal to tune in and check out the band if they hadn’t. Desert Daze, as a cultural gatekeeper, has its own gravitational pull, and when it anoints a band the entire surrounding solar system of psych kids, stoners, and experimental lifers follow suit. Pigs were not just handed entry; they earned it by blasting open doors with sheer force of sound until everyone had to notice.
What you get upon first checking out the band is the feeling of a total tour de force live experience, one that drips and oozes with just as much bodily fluid as sonic discharge. Once the goop blocking your eardrums is forcibly expelled, the music hits harder and you’re thankful for the deep cleaning. It’s less a concert and more a ritual exfoliation of the psyche where distortion scrapes off dead layers of thought.
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Their latest album, which triggered their touring of the states, came out in April and is called Death Hilarious. On songs like the album’s opener, “Blockage”, you feel the riveting chug of guitars pushing you forward, as if barreling down a desert highway without brakes. Above the guitars, is this psychedelic reverbing vocal that sounds like a voice from above, some kind of personified nature elemental. The vocals are not just lyrics but transmissions, chants hurled across psychic fields.
The vocal’s inhumanity is part of the band’s heavy metal character. This is music that transcends the ordinary, everyday humdrum of human endeavors and makes music for and about the heavy happenings of higher realms. Their art lives where myth bleeds into nightmare and nightmare circles back into something strangely celebratory.
The album does a 180 into a different metal subgenre on the second song, going straight sludge and doom with “Detroit”. With guitars so heavy, slow, and down tuned that it feels like climbing out a tar pit, the band reaches lower depths than outfits going for branding ten times darker. You realize quickly that Pigs x7 are not interested in fitting inside any single box. Instead, they drag you across the whole museum of heavy and trippy music through the ages.
Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, as intense and visceral as their sound, like to keep things light in terms of their exterior. Wearing shorts, maybe a Stone Cold Steve Austin shirt, and going barefoot, the band’s singer Matthew Baty lets his intensity come out in his performance style, not any kind of subtlety or fashion statement. That same lightness can be extrapolated from the band’s album artwork, which is often chaotic, colorful, and psychedelic but not in the sit back and smoke way. It’s psychedelic in the violence within surreal hallucination or euphoric breakthrough kind of way. The color is always soaked in menace, the laughter always tinged with doom- The lunatic is in my hall.
Any way you slice it, what defines a Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs live show is the fuzz and the absolute ear-splitting volume of it all. Whether the band decides they want to bring you to hell with a song so slow and doomy you can’t escape their clutches, or they decide they want you to headbang like mad to pure party rock, whatever kind of ammunition they’re packing in the chamber, the band should be designated as some kind of LRAD weapon. This isn’t the kind of musical weapon to torture people or disperse riots though, this is the kind of sonic weapon to bring them together and start breaking down the walls. It’s communal destruction, the kind that levels your defenses so you can feel something real.
So yeah, this was my understanding of the band prior to even getting to the Lodge Room on this especially strange and confusing Friday night. This wasn’t a typical Friday night to punctuate the end of a work week. Like every week in America, this was yet another fragmented series of WTF moments that can only be assembled into logical messages with the power of music as the soundtrack to your recall and rumination. I needed Pigs x7 to piece it all together and to piece it all together, I needed to break it apart first.
The first band to open the night was The Paranoyds, one of Los Angeles’ favorite hometown garage, psychedelic punk outfits. With just as much slacker alternative drawl, mindblowing hippie energy, and bombast punk grit infusing their sound, this was the perfect way to hop aboard the evening’s wild, anything goes wavelength.
The Paranoyds are a perfect bridge actually, between the psychedelic Echo Park bubble and the sonic character of that time, place, and feeling, to the heavy, genreless noise of Pigs x7. Stuck in a setting like Los Angeles, where status is vital and art has to balance itself between raw, unappealing attitude and enviable charm, you have to look the part while jamming like animals. They embody that tension, and by the time they handed the stage over the entire crowd was limber, dazed, and ready for punishment.
Once the Paranoyds finished, out came the burly, party hungry Brits, ready to deafen the loyal for their troubles. Pigs is one of those bands where volume is a defining part of the band’s brand. Bands like Swans, Sonic Youth, Sleep, Sunn O))), and Pigs x7 all like to let the tinnitus serve as the relic you take home from the show, now that no one holds onto paper ticket stubs. The ringing in your ears becomes a badge of honor.
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Walking onto stage with AC/DC’s “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)”, the band let us know right away the tone of the evening’s festivities. Anytime a band is introduced or walked to AC/DC, it’s the sign of a good night to come or a goodnight finished. It’s a way of saying we’re not just here to play, we’re here to consecrate the space with noise.
The set they played, which saw Matthew Baty’s sweat launching off his body into the eyes and band shirts of the headbangers in the front row, was filled with songs old and new ranging from all over the band’s catalogue.
Starting off new with “The Wyrm” off Death Hilarious, a song sitting dead in the album’s center, the guitars kept building and building until climbing to a peak so high that they could only descend into a wild freefall the moment the first lyric was belted out. As soon as words married riffs, the whole dance floor grooved and banged without a single logical thought able to form in their heads. It was all heavy metal feeling from then on- no two braincells could rub together in the hopes of summoning thoughts, they were all dancing too hard.
That is perhaps the meaning of the song’s repeated lyric: “idiocy, idiocy, idiot. Idiocy, idiocy, idiocy”. A mantra to stop thinking and start feeling.
The band then hopped backward to their 2023 album, Land of Sleeper, bringing things to a much more psychedelic feel, although keeping the electrified nature of the previous romp. Staying on that album, the band played “Mr. Medicine”, a song that feels like a fuzzier school of Sabbath worship.
Moving backward through the years, the band performed “Reducer” next, a wild, chaotic, drug filled rollercoaster ride upon a guitar solo. Then, just as things felt so completely and sonically out of control, the band restabilized and ventured back to the business at hand, showcasing their new music off Death Hilarious with “Carousel” and “Stitches”, the latter of which is a bluesy, swaggering story that you would totally buy that Tom Waits inspired if someone told you.
The evening kept passing between the states of mind, from fast, riveting rock and roll, we constantly plunged into the dark, doomy depths that laid beneath every song just waiting to pull us back in. It wasn’t until the band closed the evening with “A66”, a song off 2018’s King of Cowards, that it finally hit me why this band has been taken into the embrace of the Los Angeles psych scene, not just as sonic godfathers from abroad, but as perfect encapsulations of an LA sound fed through another country’s filter.
Imagine for a second if the sound of LA psych, most perfectly represented by The Doors, blended with Britain’s psych sound, most perfectly represented as Black Sabbath. Take that sound and modernize it, give it marching orders to play transcendent, existential rock and roll until you sweat blood and there you have Pigs.
Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs performs a sound that is both familiar and exotic to psychedelic listeners in Los Angeles. It’s familiar in that it can keep noisy, chaotic, insane, wild sounds contained within sensible songwriting. It’s exotic in that it abstracts everything you think you know about psych and metal into a wholly new animal that only they get to define- because they’re the only band making music heavy, psychy, doomy, and stoned in this unique form.
Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs is like no band you’ve heard before, or will hear after. There are comparisons you can make, but all fall short of the real thing once it’s standing in front of you ripping shreds into the fabric of reality. It’s a wholly novel sound that can’t help but break boundaries and is therefore, psychedelic without even trying.
Words: Rob Shepyer
Photos: Lexi Bonin
