The men behind Pig Destroyer are insane. There’s no other explanation for it. How else could they possibly make such music? How else could JR Hayes write such disturbing lyrics that sound straight out of JG Ballard’s or Jack Kerouac’s sick, sick imaginations (read Crash by Ballard to see what I’m talking about), or Scott Hull write such annihilating riffs that fit the music perfectly, or… well, you’re getting the idea. But how can you not love a grind band that quotes William Burroughs on the back of their inlay card?

Pig Destroyer is the fucking nutballs grind band that could, and they hail from Washington DC. The team of vocalist/utterly sick fuck JR Hayes, 250-bpm-riff-master Scott Hull, and trigger-free percussionist Brian Harvey combine to form some weird-as-fuck grind music that includes elements of jazz, loads of thrash (nearly twelve riffs per one-minute to one-half-minute song) influence, the smallest dab of hardcore, and some death metalish technicality and dynamics combine to form music that is not for your average soccer mom by any stretch of the imagination.

Nay, this music may be too extreme for some of you, even. At times, they challenge None So Vile-era Cryptopsy for the most extreme music on the planet that I have heard so far, and though I am relatively new to metal (by some standards), I have heard hundreds and hundreds of bands thanks to record store connections. These guys are among the most extreme I’ve ever heard.

On to the production, which is dirty, raw, and yet clear. A never-ending noise wall of guitars bludgeons you senseless while JR Hayes screams like a madman and Harvey just beats the everloving shit outta those drums. I can only imagine what these guys sound like live, and what their mosh pits must be like.

The songs themselves are fucking intense, switching ideas like Kelly Osbourne switches hair colors, dropping old (IE: they’ve used the idea for more then three seconds) ideas like torn books into the garbage while throwing out new ones faster then you can blink. Polyrythyms and time signatures reminiscent of Meshuggah on speed, coke, crack, and caffeine all at once? You got em. Riffs that could have come from Kreator’s landmark release, Pleasure to Kill? You got em. Drumming that could make Danny Carey blink twice? You got it. Almost anything in extreme music canon is used at least twice here, and it all blends together in a massive orgy of horrific violence and brute force.

Highlights? The entire second disc, which contains a song that could have been recorded by Black Sabbath, if they had lost their collective minds and shot up loads of heroin mixed with acid. This lord of the pit goes by the name Natasha, and is one of the single greatest epic doom metal songs ever recorded. It was spawned in the back room of JR Hayes’s demented mind and let loose to wreak blood fire and death on this world. It’s also DVD-only, so if you don’t have a DVD player, you can’t have your mind slowly removed from your open skull by the sheer weight of it. Too bad for you, since you’re missing out.

Highlights from the album include Gravedancer, which thrashes like Dark Angel, Towering Flesh, with it’s indescribably disgusting feel, Terrifyer, with its head-banging riffs, and many, many more.

Buy this if you like extreme music. Hell, buy it if you don’t, it’ll be a great talking point with strangers as to why the album you’re listening to has a topless dead woman on the cover.

PS: Check out the video for Gravedancer, it rips ass. They play it on Headbanger’s Ball occasionally.