ALL PIGS MUST DIE, NARROWS
9 p.m. Dickson Theater. $5.
Both Narrows and All Pigs Must Die include personnel from several other notable hardcore bands. But that’s not really all that important, because both bands deserve to be judged on their own brutal merits.
All Pigs Must Die’s album “God is War” is eight songs of pure, scorched-earth annihilation, all blackened, pummeling riffs welded to galloping D-beat thrash and unhinged screaming from frontman Kevin Baker, like some unholy spawn of Discharge, Slayer, Black Flag and Mayhem. Plus it has the most awesomely blasphemous cover art I’ve ever seen. Baker told Revolver last year that he and the other members wanted to create something “nasty.”
Did they ever. APMD sounds so vicious and deadly and righteously pissed off that they could wipe away everything that’s twee and precious and lame from the last decade of music with a single bludgeoning riff. I’ve probably listened to “God is War” and the band’s 2010 self-titled EP more than anything else in the last six months. It’s the most hair-raising, jaw-clenching, blistering metal I’ve heard in forever and is exciting in a way that hearing “Reign in Blood” for the first time was. It’s that good.
Narrows has a less metal, more noisy, post-hardcore sound, but it rocks way, way more than anything else I’ve heard in that genre in a long time. I wish so hard that this show was stopping in Little Rock as well, but it’d probably be worth it to head up to Fayetteville and not miss the best hardcore show of the year.
After the jump, check out “Hungry Wolf, Easy Prey” by All Pigs Must Die.