If you ever needed proof that anger is one of the purest human emotions, just give a listen to Fukpig’s bewilderingly-named third album, 3. To elaborate, a sample lyric from “Delight in the Dying of the Light” goes a little something like this: “So Armageddon is coming / Let’s give it a fucking kiss / Just a world full of cunts, liars, and scumbags / No reason to exist.” So yeah, safe to say these lads are a bit cheesed off about something.
Fukpig is yet another side-project of Anaal Nathrakh’s Mick Kenney, though it is his brother Paul Kenney who functions as principal songwriter and mastermind. If you’re at all familiar with the sludgy, grinding chaos they kicked out in Mistress (in fact, in terms of line-up, Fukpig is basically Mistress minus Dave Hunt and with a bit of role reshuffling), then you’re a bit of the way to understanding the hellish and horrible racket packed into these sixteen song-grenades.
More to the point, if you’ve heard either of the band’s previous two full-lengths, 2009’s Spewings from a Selfish Nation and 2010’s Belief is the Death of Intelligence, you know exactly what to expect, which is a crusty, slightly blackened grindcore, taking the overall sound of very early Anaal Nathrakh and applying it to songwriting that pays feral fealty to the throne of Extreme Noise Terror, early Napalm Death, and Discharge.
The songwriting is fairly uniform throughout, with simple, scuzzy guitar riffs, relentless d-beating, and the occasional backing of diseased-sounding keyboards which give it that vaguely blackened hue. Vocalist Duncan Wilkins’s outraged hollering is pushed way to the front, and the man sounds honestly unwell. (See in particular the throat-shredding a cappella outro to “Eulogy of a Crushed Romantic.”) These are short, sharp shocks of classic leftist grindcore themes and general misanthropic disgust, all of which yields some great singalong moments, from the repeated refrain of “Who the fuck asked for you?” (“Democracy Reset”), the hurry-up-and-puke catchiness of “Fascist Moron,” or the delightful “No gods, no masters / Just an endless parade of fucking bastards” (“A Matrix Made of Shit”).
The occasional nuance does break up the onslaught — whether the more melodic chords of “Archaic Beliefs,” or the clean guitars keening through the squall of “Delight in the Dying of the Light” — but Fukpig functions best at full-speed-ahead, wheels-coming-off recklessness. The most surprising subtlety is the way the chorus of “In the Absence of Your Saviour” partially resolves into a major chord progression before breaking off into a quick disco beat and a breakdown. It’s probably the album’s best song, but here’s an important point: Maybe 40 seconds before the end of the song, the band comes to a full stop, and there’s a second or so of silence before they come back in to rage through the chorus once more.
In the hands of a band more clever or self-conscious, this might seem like a coy, listener-baiting move; with Fukpig, it just sounds like they got sick of playing, chucked down their instruments, fucked off to the pub for a while, and then came back to the studio to find the tape paused where they had quit. If you close your eyes just right you can probably imagine one of them saying, in your best internal Brummie, “Right, you cunts, why not do the chorus one more bloody time?”
3 is 33 minutes of loud, sloppy, obnoxious, overdriven, underproduced, and mostly simplistic yelling and bashing. And that’s pretty goddamned alright.
