PIG DESTROYER
Studio Report Exclusive
By: Richard Johnson
Photo: Scott Kinkade
Pig Destroyer is in the middle of recording its new album for Relapse, which has been eagerly anticipated by fans of the band and the extreme music press, not to mention the label, for months and months and months.
Guitarist Scott Hull, who is also producing, has on his to-do list the recording of JR Hayes’ vocals to complete, after which, employing a new program, he will work with the sound quality of the drums which Brian Harvey has performed previously.
“[Scott] gets to select his drum sounds, an then he goes in and like fixes each drum hit according to the dynamic of the hit,” begins JR. “So it’s not like a trigger where everything’s consistent. It’s a really interesting program, but it’s really heavy on the memory so it maxed out the computer, so we have to get another computer and then keep goin’.”
JR is working on arranging his lyrics for the coming vocal sessions. Besides attaching lyrics to songs that are so new that they haven’t been performed live, there are new songs to be recorded that the band has played live, despite the lack of a finalized lyric arrangement. With playing these songs live, “I just kinda [went] by the seat of my pants,” JR says.
For the studio JR has his approach. “Basically I just write lyrics independently. When we’re going to do vocals, me and Scott sit down and the bulk of the time is spent putting the lyric on the song and then just kinda go with that.”
Still, every song is a little bit different. “When you’re in the studio it’s different than when you’re playing live, you know what I’m saying’? When you’re doing the song at practice you figure out better ways to do certain things.”
JR has a lyrical concept worked out, as well as a story that the band will include. The last album, Prowler In The Yard, had a concept, but as JR explains, “It wasn’t by design. Everything like the cover art, the lyrics, and the story kind of serendipitously ended up working together pretty well, but this one’s a little more working together from the beginning, like building the concept from the ground up as opposed to kind of tying it in at the end.”
“With Prowler,” continues JR, “I just had this story that I was working on and I wasn’t even really thinking about it going in the record, but then I thought it’d be something else to look at, something else to check out.”
But on the new record, “I’m almost overdoing it I think, because you have to walk a fine line. The focus still has to be on the music. It’s about the album; it’s about the music. But I’m just kind of attaching all this peripheral stuff that’s there if you want to check it out. But I kind of feel like on this record I’m almost taking it too far.”
Of the music, listeners and music critics regard Pig Destroyer as a frontrunner of the grindcore style, not only because the group boasts excellent musicians and recording techniques. In the past, even only by way of a certain number of songs, the band has discussed keeping alive the reputation of Pig Destroyer playing grindcore. “Speaking for myself, I don’t really think about records in those terms,” says JR, “‘cause every song is on an individual basis. I’m not really into writing fast songs for the sake of having fast songs. I think that’s kind of pointless.”
With the new recording, says JR, “I don’t want to feel like we’re obligated to do anything. If we do a record that doesn’t have any blast beats on it, then there’s going to be a reason for that. We wouldn’t consciously do that just because we’re being difficult or whatever. It’s more like, whatever we’re doing at the time, we want to try to stay true to that, and not kinda push it in these directions because of what other people might expect.”
JR takes the point further by explaining, “I think that’s what kinda makes us not a grindcore band now, is because we’re thinking more in terms of song as opposed to formula.”
JR goes on, “I don’t know what we are. I’m probably the worst person to ask.” And at the risk of using labels, “I have always considered us a punk band or a hardcore band in my mind, ‘cause I think live, when we’re together as a band, we perform more like a punk band than a metal band.”
While JR doesn’t think grindcore is an unfair descriptive term when speaking of Pig Destroyer, “Grindcore is kinda defined by a certain sound or a certain drumbeat, to get really technical about it, and we think of the blast beat not as something we need to fall back on. It’s just another drumbeat to us.”
JR feels strongly that Pig Destroyer is recording a record that tops Prowler In The Yard. “I think the material’s more interesting,” he says. “With the new record, every song we have has a reason to exist. There’s something in the song that is interesting and different than the other songs. So I think it’s going to be a more complete package. And the blast beats that we do have on the record are much faster than the last record, so that’s good.”
PIG DESTROYER’s forthcoming release, tentatively titled Terrifyer, will be released Spring, 2004 via Relapse. Stay tuned to www.RELAPSE.com for more information.
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