Review Summary: ‘Kiss the Pig’ is meaner than a necrotic offal pit swarming with deranged blood simple Rotweilers.
After more than a decade of extreme metal terror Today is the Day open fire with the shock and awe of 11 coruscating and downright lunatic aural fragment grenades. If I’m being honest I am more familiar with Steve Austin’s sterling work as producer of fine music including (Ichabod, Lamb of God, Goatsblood – it’s very odd but I’ve just noticed that all three bands end with the letters OD, an omen of our decadent times?) but until now I have never felt drawn to their music and so it was with genuine curiosity that I listened to ‘Kiss the Pig’, firstly I was attracted to the title, now of course imbuing a moniker is too much import is facile but in this case the bluntness of the title is a powerful and succinct indicator of the uncompromising brutal metal Today is the Day have wrought deep in bowels of the much lauded Austin Enterprises recording studio.
The tone of opening track, ‘Why they Hate us’ is a deeply misanthropic, bleak and savage one, this track doesn’t so much as coax a response from the listener but poleaxe them with a unprovoked, lightning fast, steel capped boot to the genitals and then once the aural foreplay is over Steve Austin rips open your torso with a staggering barrage of guitar noise, which has the clinical efficacy of a mortician’s bone saw, ‘why they hate us’ literally hollows you out, spreading your once neatly -packed viscera torn and bloody and oozing wetly on the carpet…Many of the tracks are designed to inflict as much pain and disorientation upon the listener as swiftly and dispassionately as possible, and unlike many extreme metal bands who are little more than whey faced dilettantes, on ‘Kiss The Pig’ there is a very tangible sense of cruelty, asceticism and blood red homicidal rage.
Steve Austin is clearly a troubled soul, his blatant love of ballistic hardware seems to have poisoned his guitar playing which is some of the most arrhythmic, and psychotic I have ever heard, each tense, violent chord is wildly unpredictable and torn from his instrument with the unbridled force that could uproot a hundred year old oak tree. But is his bedlamite vocalizing, which really unnerves here, Mr. Austin comes across as some kind of deranged laryngeal masochist, who doesn’t so much sing as strip each meaty outburst from his red raw larynx.
I hold up my hands and admit freely that I dislike the majority of contemporary death metal with all their generic blast beats, infuriatingly tinny, buzz sawing guitars and all these be-nailed milk faced twats grunting unintelligible gibberish about fornicating necromancers and cartoonish nihilism, all very dull and ultimately ineffectual. On ‘Kiss the Pig’, Today is the Day seemed to have neatly appropriated some of death metal’s arsenal, adopting the bruising guitar velocity, hyper sonic drumming, and their frenetic blast beats are realized quite magnificently by their astonishing Drummer, Mike Rosswog, thus generating a demoniacal album which is clearly a new brutal demographic all of its own, and fueled by a seemingly limitless reservoir of bile and murderous indignation.
One thing that is slightly troubling is the faux fight club monologue which strikes me as being too ambiguous to be a satire and is a bit too jingoistic and gung ho to be given that much credence, but that said the sublimely atmospheric acoustic track that follows is a bizarrely paradoxical way to end such an apoplectic and damaging album.
Some of my friends have a very low threshold for alcohol and a mere sixer brings out this chaotic, destructive, and profoundly insecure fragment of their persona and I feel that for some more sensitive folk the undiluted intensity of ‘Kiss the Pig’ might prove to be a frightening ordeal but for both T.I.T.D fans and lovers of dissonance this CD may well be their Citizen Kane, but a Cane fashioned from white hot razor wire and sickeningly clotted with the torn meat of yet another cowed disbeliever.
I ***ing love this Relapse release; ‘Kiss the Pigs’ is a caustic firebrand of an album, it’s overt cruelty and seismic rage is rabidly infectious and after the third spin I wanted to rush down to my local Job centre and butcher my way through a hundred dogmatic civil Servants in an ecstasy of vengeful homicide, all the while cathartically screaming the lyrics to ‘this machine kills fascists’ (much kudos for the Woodie Guthrie props – which also goes double for the brief audio snippet from the mighty Chopper) This astringent collection of songs is guaranteed to bedevil even the hardiest and most pragmatic of minds. ‘Kiss the Pigs’ dystopian view might alienate people who prefer their music to be less confrontational, and more mainstream orientated - I on the other hand feel that it is Today is the Day’s unfettered grim realism which is the albums noblest asset, and this coupled with some truly outstanding musicianship is the making of a decidedly must-have album. There is great continuity but my two favourite tracks are Bee’s Wax and Scar Wars’, which opens with a strong bass run from Chris Dubari and is followed by an infectious and monolithic riff from Steve Austin – ***ING INTENSE! And ‘Kiss The Pig’, the unrestrained rage on this track is palpable.
‘Kiss the Pig’ is meaner than a necrotic offal pit swarming with deranged blood simple Rotweilers.
