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Live Review: Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, Paris, France, May 17, 2023

Will you recognize your damn good fortune when it falls in your lap? 

With fourth album Land Of Sleeper, U.K. quintet Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs has built up an impressive catalog of stoner-doom gems. Their latest adds a dash of understated novelty (piano, guest vocals) but not at the expense of Sabbathian thunder and Melvinist snarl and sludge. The fuzz is still thick and the metal still heavy.

Live, the group’s sound has an overpowering physical effect: The low end to “Terror’s Pillow” drills down through the bowels; the dissonance in “Big Rig” is sandpaper caressing the ear drums. The Pigs are not shy about rolling in the mud; their performance in dainty Paris is elemental, primal.

Most attention is focused, quite naturally, on Matthew Baty. This dynamic singer—a barefoot Richard Simmons with a horseshoe ’stache—leaps and squats like Henry Rollins doing the haka dance. His vocals suggest Lemmy bellowing from the edge of a cliff.

After a pummeling rendition of “Halloween Bolson” from 2020 LP Viscerals, Baty announces that, with this tour on the Continent, the band is attempting to mend the U.K.’s relationships with its neighbors through rock ’n’ roll. He is frivolously offered, yet graciously accepts, a marriage proposal from some joker in the audience.

Pigsx7 answers love with love: Following acceptance of the proverbial rose, the group drops the “Ultimate Hammer”—a gritty, psych-noise solar flare that is both fearful and thankful in equal measure.

Tonight, it is the swine casting pearls. To our damn good fortune.

Eric Bensel