In 2006, when Pig Destroyer recorded “Mass & Volume” and “Red Tar”—two songs that didn’t make it onto their astounding 2007 album Phantom Limb—they had no way of knowing those songs would one day become a memorial to a dead friend. But following the passing of Relapse Records staffer Pat Egan in 2013, the progressive grindcore outfit bundled those two orphaned tracks as the Mass & Volume EP, sold it digitally, and donated the proceeds to Egan’s family. A year and a half later, Mass & Volume is seeing the light of day as an official, physical release. As a gesture of kindness to a departed comrade—Pig Destroyer have been a cornerstone of Relapse’s roster since their 2000 split with Isis—it’s beautiful. As a doom-ridden detour from the group’s typical blitzkrieg of dense, hyper-literate grind, it’s downright ugly.
Unlike the frantic Phantom Limb—or Book Burner, Pig Destroyer’s intervening album—Mass & Volume is slow. As in, glacier-dragging-a-fallen-planetoid slow. In that sense, it draws from the dour, down-tuned slither of doom metal, but it’s a far cry from either the antediluvian groove of Pentagram or the antiheroic songcraft of recent outfits like Lycus and Pallbearer. The EP’s first song, “Mass & Volume”, is clearly the sound of a grind band unhinging its jaw to accommodate the proportions of doom; most Pig Destroyer tracks do their duty in under three minutes, while “Mass & Volume” weighs in at over 19. When Pig Destroyer decides to play doom, however, it’s best to assume it won’t go unexamined. All the requisite components are there: hovering feedback, threatening riffs, and chasms of pregnant space. But frontman J. R. Hayes unfurls his unintelligible tongue as if it’s the red carpet to hell, a far more alien delivery than most doom bands, and guitarist Scott Hull is just as apt to let his instrument drone, disintegrate, and ultimately eat its own tail as he is to actually summon a chord.
“Red Tar” is only three times as long as your average Pig Destroyer song, but those six and a half minutes are milked of every conceivable ounce of sludge. Here the EP finally resembles a Pig Destroyer 45 played on 33, plain and simple, with none of the compositional mutation on display in “Mass & Volume”. It’s the perfect complement; tighter and more coherent—inasmuch as Hayes and Hull’s mutual assured deconstruction could ever be called coherent—the song creeps from plateau to plateau, leaving a trail of viscera in its wake. “Grief crawls in the shadow of time/ Try to keep in mind/ It’s all finite,” Hayes grunts in existential agony. Instead of seeming like some noble savage, he’s a trapped animal, snarling and soon to be gutted.
The fact that “Mass & Volume” and “Red Tar” were amputated from the final version of Phantom Limb lends the two songs their own sick humor and grotesque gravity—qualities that, not coincidentally, Pig Destroyer specialize in. It’s left to the listener’s imagination to guess how appropriate the EP might be as a tribute to Egan. That shouldn’t matter, of course; a good EP is a good EP, and Mass & Volume fits that bill. Yet the circumstances surrounding any piece of music are not separable from the experience of hearing it, and that’s how it should be. Pig Destroyer has long trafficked in the absurdism of mortality, the profundity of body-horror, and the contortion of metal tropes themselves. There’s a perverse soulfulness at the core of their music, though, and in slowing their berserk onslaught to a vulnerable slither, Hayes and crew have turned Mass & Volume into something heart-stoppingly sorrowful. Pig Destroyer, poignant? The notion isn’t as strange—nor, as the EP demonstrates, as forced—as one might think. Mass & Volume barely moves, but it’s definitely moving.
