When a band says that they play a blend of x and y metal, I tend to be a little suspicious. In my experience, most cases that claim this end up playing half x half y, rather than a true hybrid. Some tracks are x, some are y, sometimes they’ll put them together in a single song, but keep it nonetheless segregated within the track. Of course, there are always exceptions—Behemoth is probably the biggest one that comes to my mind, blending black and death metal into something that has elements from the two but is wholly separate. Cattle Decapitation comes to mind with their fusion of death metal and grindcore, but I haven’t a whole lot of attention to them besides obsessing over their album To Serve Man years ago.
I say all this because the Netherlands’s Pigteeth represents this idea of genre fusion very well (but not perfectly), combining grindcore, crust punk, hardcore, and some black metal, among a few other genres into…something that cannot be really described but rather needs to be heard to be truly understood.
Take the track “Spirits of Woe” off of their latest album Deathless (not to be confused with the Revocation album of the same name) as an example; it uses simple, but powerful licks that definitely lie in hardcore, but have a gloominess to them that could only be inspired by doom and black metal. The guitar tone is pure crust punk, with the mids scooped out to hell. Pigteeth’s vocalist has a screaming that is very hardcore- and grindcore-influenced, but on “Spirits of Woe” he’s able to channel that anger and raspiness into something better suiting a doom metal album.
I think the only real complaint I have with Pigteeth is the schizophrenic tendency of their track lengths; most of the songs on Deathless are about a minute or less, but there are a few that range from two to five minutes, which makes their output seem a little less blended than I’d like. (Grindcore-focused tracks = shorter track time, hardcore and doom-focused tracks = longer time.) But this complaint shouldn’t be a deciding factor to not listen to Pigteeth; this comes more from me being a picky douche than anything.
Overall, I highly enjoyed listening to Deathless. I don’t think it’s the best release I’ve heard this year, but it’s nonetheless a fun record that could very much be interpreted as a harbinger of great things to come from Pigteeth.