Metropolis Records – 7th March 2025
Christopher Nosnibor
As Metropolis continue with their run of PIG reissues, the arrival of the remastered Wrecked reminds us of the run they had in the 90s. Having hardened up the sound showcased on debut album A Poke in the Eye… and follow-up Praise the Lard, and having toured with Nine Inch Nails in the Downward Spiral tour, PIG found themselves signed to Trent Reznor’s Nothing label for the release of Sinsation (1995), which melded the more experimental aspects of The Swining and Red Raw & Sore from a couple of years previous and cranked up the guitars – and the sleaze and depravity – to eleven. And after Sinsation came Wrecked, and having returned to Wax Trax!, in the US at least, the album was released first in Japan in ’96 and the US a year later with a substantially different tracklisting – and was an absolute bastard to get here in the UK in either form.
This version brings together the tracks which featured on both the original Japanese edition – which was criminally missing ‘No One Gets Out of Her Alive’ and ‘Contempt’ – and the American edition, which brought ‘The Book of Tequila’ and ‘Fuck Me I’m Sick’ in their place.
Wrecked very much represented PIG at their wildest, most wide-ranging, and arguably their heaviest. The title track drifts in on some mellow steel guitar country vibes and ambient chilling… and then gets gnarly with gritty industrial rigging and snarly vocals that are quintessential PIG. Raymond Watts may not have been in the best place during this period, but creatively… the music he was making was something else, and Wrecked stands up just as well now as it did on release. I’ve mentioned previously that PIG stand apart from their contemporaries, and while Watts was a touring member of Foetus in the late 80s and worked with JG Thirlwell when PIG was born, as well as being a member of KMFDM for a time, as much as those elements of aggrotech and industrial metal are core to the sound, Watts took it somewhere else entirely. Where? It’s hard to say: PIG’s work simply doesn’t conform to any genre forms or models – PIG just are PIG. While a couple of tracks had been previously released in different forms – the original versions of ‘Find It, Fuck It, Forget It’ and ‘Blades’ appeared on The Swining, released only in Japan in 1993 (prior to a 1999 US reissue) – it would be wrong to suggest that their inclusion on Wrecked suggested a lack of material, given just how radically different these versions are. The same is true of the reworked version of ‘My Sanctuary’, which appeared on Praise the Lard: expanded, more grandiose, more everything, the ‘Spent Sperm Mix’ taking the track to preposterous heights while audaciously combining industrial, techno, and gospel with orchestral strikes galore.
Since the US and Japanese editions included various alternative mixes, it would have been nice to see this version feature all sixteen tracks featured on the 2017 tour edition, which is arguably the definitive edition. But what we learn here is that you can’t have everything, and this edition at least has the majority of the prime cuts. Sequentially, it follows the Japanese edition, with the tracks which featured on the US release at the end.
The drumming on this album is brutal, choppy, the guitars cutty, stuttering, heavily distorted, but with a bright, clear, digital crispness that really slice hard. Watts growls, snarls and sneers, dark and salacious, and everything about Wrecked is harsh and ugly. ‘Find It, Fuck It, Forget It’ is a full-throttle beast of a track, with a sample-laden breakdown in the mid-section, with snippets of reports on American obesity and the like (in place of the sped-up snippet of ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ on the original), and it’s pretty dark and unforgiving.
‘Blades’ is one of the greatest tracks ever recorded by PIG or anyone – it’s one of those songs that just does something to you. The ‘Slash Mix’ on here may not be the best version – for my money, I prefer the more orchestral original, but this rendition is dense and girthy, and fits with the sound of Wrecked. Then there’s ‘Save Me’, the album’s slowie, and so, so powerful. It takes ‘anthemic’ in a whole new direction.
Watts has always made music with a boldly theatrical approach to the industrial template – and Wrecked really turns up the dial on everything – density, volume, aggression, intensity, and this expanded reissue is an essential document in the broader industrial oeuvre. It’s also an outstanding album in its own right.
AA
Aural Aggravation 