Pig Destroyer - Book Burner

Music, for me, is all about searching out some kind of authentic experience. I have no patience for cheap imitations. Guys like Nick Cave and Tom Waits can hide behind all the theatrics and artifice they want, but the truth of their music is always staring you in the face. PJ Harvey hits every bit as hard on Dry as she does on White Chalk or Let England Shake, it's just a question of where she chooses to punch you. Nothing makes me feel joy the way The Meters or a live James Brown performance do. Suffocating dread and menace? Unsane. Unwavering strength in the face of adversity? It's got to be Black Flag or Converge.

But if you want the purest form of utter nihilism and viciousness, you go to Pig Destroyer.

There's no Devil worship or Satanic masses in Pig Destroyer's world or any of the other typical iconography associated with the genre. You get the sense reading their lyrics that Satan is as big a joke as everything else and his name would only be invoked in order to piss off the squares. There's no costumes here. If you want a glimpse into the worldview that gives P.D. their engine, vocalist and lyricist J.R. Hayes' short story included in the deluxe edition of Book Burner is the place to start. Dedicated to Christopher Hitchens, "The Atheist" is more of a rough sketch than an actual story but it's a perfect example of where these guys are coming from. One man, smart, educated and alone, in a survivalist paradise running from a theocracy gone insane. It's everyone's biggest fears about the direction of our country put in plain language and shoved right under your nose; a Ted Kaczynski manifesto as fiction.

Five years on from their last album, Phantom Limb, the Pig Destroyer sound has gotten fuller, more lush. They've retained the fury and velocity of a 747 spiraling to the ground but the addition of noise man Blake Harrison and the experience of guitarist/producer Scott Hull has given the music an extra dimension. Seth Putnam's joke that "grindcore is very terrifying" no longer seems very funny. This is harrowing stuff.

There's a lot of other good grindcore bands working today but the intelligence and unpredictability of Pig Destroyer is what puts them at the top of the heap. No one else in metal can match the compact yet detailed crime scene photos that are J.R. Hayes' lyrics. There's no political agenda and no right answer. We're all fucked. We're going to die scared, alone and covered in our own blood. And when you listen to him tell you, you believe it.

Songs like "The Diplomat" and "The Boston Strangler" are lengthy for a P.D. song and give them time to stretch a bit and explore while other songs like "Eve" or "Burning Palm" run roughshod in under two minutes. Track by track descriptions sort of miss the point. Grindcore is abrupt and crushing by nature. You're getting nineteen tracks that clock in at just under 32 minutes. The band has clearly broken drummers in the past but Misery Index drummer Adam Jarvis acquits himself nicely in his first album with the band

Not much else needs to be said. Along with Saint Vitus, High On Fire and the new Converge, this is one of the best metal albums of the year. All veteran bands at the peak of their powers. Miss this record at your own peril.

If you pick up the album, be sure to get the deluxe edition. Not only does it include "The Athiest" but also a bonus EP of classic punk covers called Blind, Deaf And Bleeding. It includes covers of the mighty Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Negative Approach, Minor Threat and a really killer version of Angry Samoans "Light's Out."

Splatterhouse (2010)

I've always been fascinated by what people consider a "bad game." As a guy who grew up watching shitty horror flicks interspersed with weird foreign movies on Cinemax and chasing down any music I could find in the pre-internet to pre-Napster era, usually by watching MTV after midnight (hey, it was suburban/rural Pennsylvania... we didn't get an "alternative rock" radio station until nu metal came along), I quickly learned that the best stuff wasn't necessarily the best-looking. To this day, I have as much love for something like Critters 3 or Cyborg 2 as I do bigger budget megaplex fare.

In the gaming world, I love tracking down the weird stuff. Buying a new copy of Deadly Premonition without having read a single thing about it or heard anything from anyone and diving into all it's terrible awesomeness has been a highlight for me in this generation of gaming. Grasshopper Manufacture's Shadows Of The Damned was a gleefully cheesy homage to B movies and cult horror classics mixed with a liberal dose of machismo that, despite some dated controls, was an absolute blast to play. It was also widely ignored by fans. There's also Atlus' demented dating sim from Hell/puzzle game Catherine. Hell, most of the games Atlus puts out have a wide streak of weirdness in them. And that's just off the top of my head. If you're willing to take a risk, there's plenty of rough diamonds out there to find.

That said, does Namco's remake of the gore classic Splatterhouse series fall into the category of "cheesy cult classic" the way the previously mentioned games do? Eh. Not really. But it's still worth playing.

Splatterhouse started as a blatant Friday The 13th rip-off done in the style of a side-scrolling beat-'em-up. It was cheap, crass, gory and tough. Like a lot of games of it's generation, the plot was largely incidental: boy meets girl, girl gets kidnapped by evil doctor, boy puts on cursed mask that turns him into a hulking monster and goes on a monster-killing rampage. It spanned a few different games that found their way to different systems with varying degrees of success. I have a lot of fond memories of smacking shambling monsters with a two-by-four but the series holds a sentimental place in my heart more for it's willingness to go for the gore in an age of very kid friendly platformers.

The remake stays the course with a fleshed out re-telling of the original story in the form of a 3rd person brawler. It's got boobs, blood and a surprisingly killer heavy metal soundtrack. On paper, it was a game designed perfectly for me. I mean, as a collectable, you pick up torn photos of your kidnapped girlfriend topless. Yes, goofballs like me were certainly the target audience.

Things got lost in the implementation, though. Most notably, combat. Most of it is a standard 3rd person brawling with a leveling system a la Devil May Cry or God Of War. However, weapons are rare and degrade quickly so you're going to be fist fighting through a majority of the game. Therein lies the problem. There's a wealth of different moves to buy but a lot of them seem superfluous and not as effective as I'd have liked. I found myself using the same five or six moves throughout the game.

Also problematic were the context-sensitive finishers. The game doesn't have a ton of enemy variety and all enemies have only a maximum of two finishers. Ripping a giant creature's asshole out might be worth a giggle the first couple of times but tedium sets in fast. By the time you hit the last third of the game, you've seen just about everything and merely repeat the same fights over and over again.

Creature design is so-so. Mostly they are variations of the enemy types you'd expect, right down to the evil clowns. Some of the enemies seem to be based on the original Splatterhouse designs and feel too generic. The levels also feel a bit too familiar: creepy mansion, creepy junkyard, creepy circus, etc.

The game picks up in other areas, though. The gore is fantastic. Without hyperbole, this is possibly the bloodiest game I've ever played. Everything is soaked in it. It's even the in-game currency for leveling up your character.

The biggest surprise was the story itself. Not necessarily the characters, they're very much archetypes. Rick, the hero, is metal nerd and a college student. Jennifer, the inexplicably hot girlfriend, is a screaming plot device with no personality. The villian, Dr. West, is a Lovecraft character dialed up to eleven. Though they were stuck using the thinly drawn characters from the original games, there was still room to play around with the characterizations to make things feel more interesting. Particularly Jennifer, who exists only to be kidnapped. They probably would have been better off making her either more nerdy hot (with the nude pictures you collect during the game showing a racier side of her) or a more righteous modern chick that doesn't enjoy being forced into a victim role. As a generic blond hottie, Jennifer is a character archetype better off updated for the times.

However, working within the confines of the original story, writer Gordon Rennie (a former writer for the legendary UK comic magazine 2000 A.D) improves on things admirably. The Terror Mask that saves Rick from a bloody death is given a gruff, profanity heavy personality (voiced by Jim Cummings, who you might remember as Darkwing Motherfucking Duck) that taunts and teases the freaked-out and panic-y Rick throughout the game. Because they are symbiotically connected, the Terror Mask can comb through the dark recesses of Rick's mind for all his dirty little secrets and happily uses that information to make Rick more and more miserable and, as a result, more pliable and easy to manipulate. The mask has it's own history and it's own reasons for saving Rick and fighting Dr. West. The interactions between the two are your primary source of dialogue and as the game reaches the conclusion, the roles have shifted a bit. Rick grows more comfortable in his new reality and the Terror Mask doesn't like it. They may need each other to survive but a stronger and more assertive Rick is detrimental to the Terror Mask's plans and they both know it.

There's also the obvious similarities between the goals of Rick and Dr. West. Ultimately, both just want their loved one back. When the game starts introducing elements of time travel, it all ties together neatly in a way I won't spoil other than to say that West's centuries long acts of hubris had damned him from the start. It's a neat and unexpected bit of nuance in a game you would not expect any nuance from. Naturally, West is now completely bugfuck and would rather invoke Lovecraftian Old Ones to destroy everything than live without his Leonora. And without a sequel to look forward to (as you'd expect, the game bombed pretty bad), the game broadly hints that Rick may end up going down the same path as West, starting the whole thing rolling all over again.

It's not Shakespeare, as the hoary old cliche goes, but in a game mostly about boobs and blood, it's a damn sight more thoughtful than you'd expect... and with the combat such a let-down, it's good to have something to look forward to.

When you're done with the single player, the game offers an arena mode that, honestly, isn't worth the time unless you're achievement hunting. The real bonus is that all of the previous Splatterhouse games are unlocked once you finish the game, allowing you to go back and re-live the magic of reducing monsters to mush in 2-D. (Of course, you could always skip ahead and just get the original Splatterhouse for your iPod/iPad as well.)

You can chalk up this remake as a noble failure. Maybe if it had an extra six months or a year in development it would have been a game worth remembering but for a niche title like this, that was probably never in the cards. Unless you're die hard about owning the original games, Splatterhouse is the definition of a "rental" but if you're looking for something a little obscure and rough around the edges, you could do a lot worse.

High On Fire - De Vermis Mysteriis

There's no lack of things in the world that we should be outraged about but, being a nerd, the things that make me angry tend to be frivolous and not a very big deal in the long run. Once or twice a year, I'll read a news article somewhere that High On Fire is going out on tour. There will be loud excitement for a half-minute because they are a tremendous live band and I never pass up an opportunity to... ah shit. They're near the bottom of a bill full of shitty metalcore/kindercore/nu nu-metal bands. Well, fuck that.

Given their history and their pedigree and the six albums worth of absolutely killer heavy metal, High On Fire should arguably be the biggest metal band in America. It's certainly not for a lack of trying. Frontman and guitarist Matt Pike was one-third of the legendary stoner doom behemoth Sleep and brings all of his weed-obsessed hesher awesomeness to High On Fire. The warrior imagery and triumphal riffage he brings cannot be fucked with. After three albums working together, Des Kensel and Jeff Matz are absolutely locked in as a rhythm section. The guys are also a hard touring band that's sure to come through your town once or twice a year. Musical trends may have moved more towards the giant pussies wearing girls' pants and asymmetrical haircuts but there's always been something honest and undeniable about H.O.F's no-bullshit approach to metal.

This iteration of the lineup, together since 2007's Death Is This Communion, is the tightest and gnarliest the band has ever been. Their previous album, Snakes For The Divine, is most memorable to me for it's opening track. The riff is just amazing.

There are other great tracks on it ("Frost Hammer," "Bastard Samurai") but that first track overshadows everything else for me. There's no such problem on De Vermis Mysteriis. There's a one-two-three-four punch of "Serums Of Liao," "Bloody Knuckles," the absolutely killer "Fertile Green," and "Madness Of An Architect"  before you get a chance to take a breath with the instrumental "Samsara."

In interviews, Matt Pike has talked about the record being a loose concept album posing the question "what if Jesus had a twin in the womb that had to die so Jesus could live... and what if that twin became a time traveler who found a scroll that teaches him how to make a serum which allows him to view his brother through the eyes of an ancestor and goes on a quest to see why he had become this religious figure that inspired all this war and bloodshed?" Which is fucking banana cakes crazy pants. It's also, like most metal albums, completely superfluous to your enjoyment of it. "Samsara" is the only point in the record where you'd have time to think about what's happening and when. "Spiritual Rights" kicks off the back half of the album with aplomb but leads into the sludgier, more ponderous "King Of Days." The end of the track highlights one of the biggest strengths of the album, the new found focus on the sound of Des Kensel's militaristic drums. Producer Kurt Ballou (metal uber-producer and member of punk mainstays Converge) gives those drumbeats an oomph that no previous producer has managed to coax. Whenever the songs open up enough to give Des the attention he deserves, it sounds fantastic. Hopefully future producers of the band will take note.

The second half of the record isn't as epic as the first but it's still rock solid. They lock into a steadier groove and ride it into the big, menacing closer "Warhorn." Jeff Matz's bass takes point over Pike's growling dissection of a battlefield. It's not the uppercut knockout the first half would lead you to expect but it's also never less than engaging.

If you get a chance to see High On Fire doing a headlining gig: take it. Or if you can put up with the prancing ninnies they seem to open for most of the time, go right ahead. The perpetually shirtless Matt Pike always makes for a compelling frontman and the band as a whole is tight as hell. It's always a good show. They may not be the biggest metal band in the world but I can think of few who are better.