Garden Ornament | The Men, Pop. 1280, White Suns, And Pygmy Shrews Regrease Pigfuck
“Living in a city where you’re face-to-face with the best and worst aspects of humanity, I think that’s inspired me to reach new lows with music,” says Kevin Barry, guitarist/yelper for Brooklyn-based industrial-strength corrosives White Suns. “To make happy music and pretend that America is this great place where we elected a black president and everyone’s happy and gay people can finally get married in New York? These are pretty small things when you look at the big picture.”
This bleak, unflinching outlook may be one reason why distortion-mad gangs of local twentysomethings-bands like White Suns, The Men, Pop. 1280, and Pygmy Shrews-are terrorizing Brooklyn’s humid loft spaces with violent defibrillations of New York noise-rock. Forced to duck beer cans, fireworks and smoke bombs at places like Death By Audio and 538 Johnson, these four bands of muckmakers are stylistically dissimilar, but all are spiritually linked to what Robert Christgau dubbed “pigfuck” in these pages in 1987-atonal downtown splatter, metallic AmRep churn and a brawny, muscular bludgeon that’s one generation removed from metalcore. Maybe the contusion-is-sex aesthetic embraced by this new generation is the result of recession anxiety, or a long-needed buzzkill for indie rock’s comfy-in-Nautica vibes. Or possibly it’s just as simple as Pop. 1280 guitarist Ivan Lip says: “We didn’t put too much thought into it. We just wanted it to be annoying.”
The most visible of the nu-pigfuck charge is Brooklyn four-piece The Men, whose Leave Home (Sacred Bones) has met an outpouring of critical accolades for its sludgegaze-submerged mix of Wipers-ready ecstasy-punk and kraut grooves. Leave Home finds its emotional center in vocals that crack and collapse and break down. “We were sick a lot,” says guitarist/vocalist Nick Chiericozzi “I had the flu during that session. I had to go to the hospital afterwards so I was pretty much on edge the entire time. My voice cracks like crazy-that’s because I was pushing hard through the sickness.”
“My goal was to just blow out my voice, just to take a toll on myself,” says bassist/vocalist Chris Hansell, who screeches “I am nothing” on the full-contact “My War”-dosed poetry-slam of “L.A.D.O.C.H.” (The acronym, Hansell confesses, stands for “The Life And Death Of Chris Hansell.”) “I didn’t really write any lyrics for that. I just kind of improvised what I was saying. I probably couldn’t tell you what I actually said, but it definitely was a ball of emotions coming out. I did the vocals at 12 at night in pitch black… My voice was probably blown out in the first minute of me singing. I didn’t want people to like it necessarily. I almost wanted to make people a little angry. ‘What is this, the same riff for six minutes?’”
“L.A.D.O.C.H.” was recorded in an empty cement classroom in the basement of a former Catholic school that until recently housed Python Patrol
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