Industrial music from past decades compares to Nine Inch Nails

Pig

Wrecked

WaxTrax!/TVT Records 1997

Recommended if you like: Ministry, Nine Inch… Pig

Wrecked

WaxTrax!/TVT Records 1997

Recommended if you like: Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Mudvayne, Static-X

Imagine for a moment that Trent Reznor and Richard Wagner had an illegitimate mutant child and raised him in London on nothing but tequila and peyote with plenty of power tools and knives to play with. Next, imagine that they unleashed him on the unsuspecting world of underground industrial music in 1988.

Raymond Watts, otherwise known as Pig, is a veteran of the now effectively defunct industrial music scene that thrived during the heyday of WaxTrax! Records in Chicago throughout the ’80s and ’90s. Most of the parties involved are either officially broken up, past their prime or simply personae non grata these days.

For the uninitiated, industrial music can be many things, but it is most simply characterized by the fusion of electronic elements with metal and heavy percussion. From that point, there exists a great deal of possible deviance, of course – the premier artists on the industrial scene included a very wide variety of sounds: the power metal duo Ministry, the distinctly Euro, beat-heavy KMFDM, the wild, synthetic, gothic Skinny Puppy and the sheet-metal banging Germans known as Einstuerzende Neubauten.

Despite the decline of the Chicago Trax scene, industrial music today is undergoing something of a renaissance – many of the bands are reuniting and generating new material, and the blending of metal and electronica has matriculated into mainstream rock.. No, Linkin Park didn’t invent that.

Pig was a regular fixture of the industrial genre throughout almost the entirety of its existence. Emerging in 1980 as a member of KMFDM, arguably the cornerstone of the scene, Watts left the group and went solo with A Poke in the Eye … With a Sharp Stick in 1988 and remains active to this day – his most recent release being Genuine American Monster in 2002.

For your post-Halloween consumption, I give you Wrecked, his fourth major album; a freight train horror show careening at a thousand miles per hour. Representative of the point in Watts’ career at which his grandiose, theatrical, industrial-goth-rock sound reached critical mass, Wrecked is a beautifully and relentlessly violent, messy, sordid album. It throws everything at the listener but still manages not to be overbearing.

The album’s sound is truly unlike anything you’re likely to have ever heard. The knee-jerk reaction is to compare Pig to Nine Inch Nails and, indeed, similarities exist – grinding guitar riffs, brooding lyrics, haunting synthetic sounds and the destroy-everything-in-your-path attitude are all there. But the differences are rather profound. While Reznor’s music is introverted, personal and ultimately thematically meek by its nature, Watts’ is ballsy, dramatic and tonally potent and evocative, while being devoid of any coherent meaning.

Pig’s sound is also just about ten times larger and more expansive than any of his contemporaries. While the staple guttural growling of Watts’ voice and wild metal guitars often take the forefront, equally prominent are blaring horns, strings and other heavy, symphonic explosions. Particularly epic are “No One Gets out of Her Alive” and “Save Me,” which feature, over their dark choruses, thundering horns and wispy strings, respectively. Other tracks, such as “Silt” and “Sanctuary” are equally tremendous, but are a breed of more traditional, synth-driven, ethereal goth.

It’s a shame that the same media that pats Reznor on the back every time he sneezes has overlooked Pig. But, because Pig isn’t particularly label-friendly in comportment or style, it’s easy to understand how this fate could befall such a truly original artist.

With a little bit of digging, Pig albums can be found at local used CD stores, as well as from online retailers. Fans of aggressive, intense music, regardless of genre, owe it to themselves to check Wrecked out, as well as Sinsation, the slightly less refined album that preceded this one.

If you can be open-minded about genre-shattering music, you’ll find that, in terms of badass-ness, Pig can rip the heads off of today’s most badass bands. And that level of intensity warrants investigation, if nothing else.