PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS - KULK
Like a lot of people, I’ve been working from home since March 2020. Unlike some, I have found it a vast improvement on working in an office, with all the associated distractions and bullshit conversations. Being required to go back in, albeit, only one day a week, has been less than welcome and today has been particularly awful. If anything is going to make me feel better it will be some loud and heavy music, so it is just as well that I’m at the Waterfront tonight.
I make no bones of the fact that I absolutely love KULK and I’ve written a fair bit about them in these pages. Tonight is a typical Kulk gig. Thom abuses his guitar and vocal chords in equal measure whilst Jade sets about pounding the kit into oblivion. It is loud, heavy, intense and utterly cathartic. Sludgey, fuzzed up, garage-no wave-doom at its very finest, that goes down a treat with this crowd.
PIGS X7 is, in many ways, a different beast. Whilst they are as heavy and intense as Kulk, their sound is a more retro - dare I say classic? - take on psych and doom. Things don’t get off to a great start with a terrible sound, so bad that I actually thought opener Reducer was GNT until it appeared later in the set. Thankfully, the mix was sorted before the end of second song Rubbernecker.
In the two and a half years since Pigs X7 last hit Norwich, frontman Matthew Baty has shed a pound or two and grown a moustache. In his own words, he looks like a pound shop Freddie Mercury. I’d disagree with that, more like latter day Mike Patton. Whatever he is in fine form, camping it up like the true entertainer he is. The rest of the band are equally at the top of their game, hammering the monumental riffs into submission, possibly the natural end point to the heavy music birthed by the likes of Iron Butterfly and Black Sabbath.
This may not have been what the doctor would have ordered - it certainly wasn’t what the ear doctor would approve of! - but it was exactly what I needed. And the audience response suggested I wasn’t the only one. Maybe it is a reawakening after the lockdowns and the lack of live music for much of the last 19 months or so but the crowds are being much more enthusiastic and friendly than I have experienced and that is a very, very good thing indeed. What a brilliant night.
