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SECT PIG
Self Reversed EP

Nuclear War Now! Productions (2015)
Rating: 5/10

Sect Pig’s new 18-minute opus is surely one of the year’s most demented releases so far. Hard to pin it down with the black metal tag to be honest because it’s so bonkers at times, Sect Pig being one of those peculiar and clearly twisted extreme metal experimentalists.

Serial killer-obsessed, Self Reversed (the follow-up to 2013’s debut mini-project Slave Destroyed) dabbles very much in avantgarde black metal where we find a mix of eerie samples, industrialised horrors and minimalistic black metal all laced by one hell of a weird and almost clinical feeling – as if some unhinged killer himself constructed such an unsettling noise.

What music we do get bombarded by is obscure. Hateful, and yet all to alienating to truly comprehend. One moment the troupe are offering up something akin to a perverse, creepy soundtrack of haunting chimes and distant echoes, and then the next we get molested by a bizarre barrage of indecipherable vocal coughs which act as a blizzard to complement the horrendous racket of smothering drum surges and frenzied blasts.

In fact, it would be all too kind to describe this wretched opus as musical. The feeling one gets is that a group of murderous asylum inmates have got together with some trash cans and thrown them around a musty garage for ten minutes or so, and the rest they’ve just played a sample from what sounds like analysis and questioning of a psychopath or two. I’ve heard some hideous noise in my time but it’s difficult to really give this a fair grading, the artists in question rarely opting for any sort of melody except until around the 16-minute mark when we’re treated to a stuffy trudge. Other than that though, this is simply puked out as one horrendous, obscure act of dementia spliced with spoken word monologues.

I can’t put it any simpler, Sect Pig veering well clear of any expected racket within the field to the point where Self Reversed isn’t really black metal at all but just an unwholesome, unrewarding din that starts off about as violent as any clamour of this sort can get. The vocals here are mere belches and grunts as the rest of Sect Pig acts as a stark maniacal strain on the ears and nothing more.

I don’t really know what else to say, but one gets the feeling that Sect Pig could churn out some of the strangest music you’ve heard, and yet I’m just thankful this disturbance only runs for just under 20 minutes.

It’s frustrating when it’s nigh on impossible to review an album but this has come as close as it gets, because Sect Pig’s second release is just a hysterical tumult which the press release describes as a “manic descent into hypnotic psychosis”. Well, I’m glad they said it, because this is a very unstable horror show most likely put together in an abattoir with an electrocuted pig proving vocal rants. The rating reflects how I’m swayed neither way by its extremity.

Neil Arnold

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