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Pig Destroyer - Prowler In The Yard (Reissue)

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    Ian Jane
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  • Pig Destroyer - Prowler In The Yard (Reissue)



    Pig Destroyer - Prowler In The Yard (Reissue)
    Released by: Relapse Records
    Released on: September 4th, 2015.
    Purchase From Amazon

    So wait… what is this? Didn't Prowler come out like more than ten years ago? Yep. In 2001, Pig Destroyer signed to Relapse Records and the first offering from that unholy communion was indeed the Prowler In The Yard album. It did well and is a landmark in the band's discography, but the band's guitarist (and engineer Scott Hull) has completely remixed the whole damn thing and also thrown into the mix a bonus track from those original sessions that was not issued previously. Normally this type of thing would piss me off, because you don't mess with history, but the CD version is actually a two disc that - so you get the original version of the album alongside the newly remixed version with the aforementioned bonus track. It is, however, limited to only 2000 copies. Only the remixed version was supplied for review purposes, however.

    Jennifer starts things off - that weird computerized voice sets the tone for the dark, craziness to follow. The band starts to play behind the voice and they launch into Cheerleader and then Scatology Homework, neither of those songs clocking in at over a minute and both of those songs kicking you in the balls. Pig Destroyer play fast and hard and without compromise and nowhere is that more obvious than on this album. Trojan Whore is more of the same, though it passes the ninety second mark. There's a great breakdown in the middle that gives you a bit of a breather, but then they launch into Ghost Of A Bullet, which is nineteen seconds long and hard to elaborate on outside of just saying 'woh.'

    Heart And Crossbones is forty-nine more seconds of GRIND. The band hits you, the vocals hit you, there's a breakdown with some Cookie Monster vocals and then it's over. Strangled With A Halo goes for it, dragging you along for the ride and screaming in your face the whole time while Intimate Slavery beats you in the face with the fastest drumming you'll ever hear and Mapplethorpe Grey is a bit… slower, at least by Pig Destroyer standards, which kind of sucks you in and makes you pay attention. Tickets To The Car Crash returns to form though, it's a thirty-nine second assault on your ears. I wonder how many songs these guys can fit into a live set? Naked Trees almost hits the two minute mark but the sound, to a certain extent, remains the same. Grindy, death-style vocals over a crunching, fast, brutal guitar/bass/drum slaughterfest. Sheet Metal Girl and Preacher Crawling don't' slow things down at all nor do they see the band experiment or go in different directions - for that reason they give you pretty much exactly what you'd want from Pig Destroyer at this point in their career. Pornographic Memory, at less than a minute, really kills you with the drumming more than anything but it's a solid track with some interesting twists and turns to it, making it stand out from the other songs here. Murder Blossom is eighteen seconds and it was over before I could type this period right here. Body Scout is fast, then slow, then fast and then slow while Snuff Film At Eleven is just fast and fast and then fast some more.

    Moving right along, Hyperviolet goes for almost three and a half minutes and it's way more interesting and experimental in some ways than anything else on the record. The guitars are the constant here, everything else sort of swirls around them in the mix and it's not as blisteringly fast as the other tracks, so you can get into a bit more. Starbelly is almost five minutes and it expands on the band's sound as well, allowing them to try do more than just set a land speed record. They open things up here, it's a fuller, more complete and more complex sound. Junkyard God gets things back under two minutes for one track (with a weird free jazz style drum solo to open it) but then Piss Angel, a Pig Destroyer classic if ever there was one, gets things back to two and a half minutes (I obsess over run times on Pig Destroyer records for some reason) and it slaps you around and makes you love it. Jennifer 2 goes straight up epic at five and a half minutes in length, again with that weird, creepy computer voice that opened the album, this time bringing the 'story' to a close. And then? The unreleased untitled track! This thing is fifty seconds long and it has no vocals but as far as instrumental tracks go it's pretty slick.

    As to the remastering job here, it sounds good. A bit cleaner, a bit clearer and a bit more polished but without sacrificing anything in terms of intensity or raw power. There's more precision to the instrumentation while the vocals remain completely hostile in both concept and delivery. If it will ever replace the original recording… well, obviously that's an individual preference but the audio quality here is rock solid and given that the physical media releases come with a bunch of bonus stuff not included with the digital version, there's that incentive to double-dip as well.

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