Pornographers Of Sound: Live In NYC (live album)
by Pig Destroyer

From Mercury 07/30/2021 04:22 | #272052

(Really heavy and great sounding Deathgrind, grindcore album with lots of more sludgy and slowed down death metal bits. This is pretty awesome and heavy stuff and proves that the legends of Pig Destroyer still have it.)

For those who aren't familiar, Pig Destroyer are fucking legends of Grindcore and Deathgrind. They also happen to be one of my all time favorite groups. And their run of 3 albums from 2001 to 2006 is extraordinary. Their 2001 album "Prowler In The Yard" is one of the best albums ever made. Check that out.

This is a live album taken from a couple concerts done in late 2019 in NYC. Its excellent. It is a bit of a comeback from their least liked album ever, 2018's "Head Cage". That album had muddy and at times quite bad production along with being less a Grindcore album and more a toned down and (relatively) uninventive Metalcore album. But with this live record the band manages to return to their more absurdly aggressive sludgy and grindcore sound while also, somehow, improving the power and clarity and thickness of the production. Several of the songs from their last 2 albums sound better played live on this than they did in the more recent album.

The whole album is badass and made me very happy with its detailed aggression and mad tempos and insane heaviness. The first half is mostly composed of the sludgier and more death metal thide of sings, and these songs in particular absolutely sound fantastic. The low end and the punchy awesome power of the sludgy riffs sound as good as I can imagine them sounding, especially impressive considering the live aspect. The closing half focuses on tracks taken from their "Golden Era" or Prowler In The Yard" and "Terrifyer". These songs aren't quite as perfectly suited for the production and thus are missing the razorblade sharpness and precision that made them so brilliant in their more pure Grindcore days. But they still sound absolutely mad and I quite like them (possibly impossible for me not to love hearing tracks like "Jennifer", "Cheerleader Corpses", and "Trojan Whore" no matter the quality of live recording... I mean they are just THAT great.)

The whole band generally sound like themselves of old. The vocals have lost a certain unholy shrieking aggressive energy, but that is to be expected. How could I ever expect a Grindcore or extreme metal vocalist of any genre to sound the same at 45 as he did at 25? The answer is I don't and I instead say here he sounds like 70% there, so still pretty menacing.

In closing, for live albums, almost without exceptions, the ones I gravitate to are ones released by my all time favorite artists, otherwise I just stick to studio records. Thus on this chart and pretty high are Pig Destroyer and Ichiko Aoba live records. And here they are likely to stay. However, generally I think of live albums as being most interesting to people who are really into the artists, and if you aren't yet familiar with the Legends then go listen to either Prowler or Terrifyer or both and then maybe come back to this album later.