The Wiggins Ate All the Pigfuck

Lately I've been hearing the term "pigfuck" bandied about a bit -- I'm friends with a Pussy Galore freak and Columbus is currently home to the nation's best approximation of pigfuck (in my eyes), the Cheater Slicks and the nation's premiere pigfuck namecheckers, the Unholy Two (with the bullets to back it up), so I'm knee deep in the shit. Research has proved that over time the term/genre/tag has come to encompass a pretty wide swath, from the Butthole Surfers to Spencer n' Hagerty's hook-bleeding snarl to any number of AmRep bands who likely only made five minutes of good records (I'll regret that one, but the discography is heavily weighted with brutality and dirt rather than sustained listening pleasure).

Well the Wiggins, especially the song "Dog" from their Dull Knife debut 7", are the closest I think one band can get to feeling that swine, sweat, skin and meat the pigfucks like to indulge in. It's the roadside bbq joint in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, steaming from the heat, stinking of chitlins, hells creepy and insect-ridden. It's the crusty lament of the lone-star state inhabitants always stuck with a dry hole. In the new century the pigfuck gets droney and clangy, clingy and dusted. "Feed the Ghost" is even better, fluctuating between Jesus and Mary Chain entrails and MES as sherriff of twang. One of those Spiral Stairs throwaways rusted down and brought back to life if only to crawl over an arid plateau of broken glass. Ouch. By the b-side I'd had enough though. At that point I'd been properly sun-stroked, so the slow-motion-go-nowhere flip started to remind of that duo from Chicago that fried bacon behind the drummer. Please don't remind me of that time.

Still. Dull Knife and the Wiggins succeed in not falling for the obvious. This Houston outfit could have easily made pigfuck standard, garage rock Gulf-o-Mexico style, but go out and scrape enough skull and tissue to crack through to even the most jaded non-believers.