Gig review: Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs at The Crescent, York

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. Picture: Ania Shrimpton

AC/DC’s For Those About To Rock roars from the PA as the lights dim to welcome the iconoclastic North-Eastern noise rockers hereafter known as a more word-count friendly Pigs x7. Rather like AC/DC, Pigs x7’s outward rock primitivism belies the musical precision behind it. The five-piece band groove and crush as one, a fine-tooled riff machine.

Bellowing frontman Matt Baty, sporting a handlebar moustache and shorts, is part evil Freddie Mercury, part Henry Rollins, but mostly that 1980s PE teacher who you still have nightmares about.

Flanked by what appear to be the disavowed doom metal siblings of Mackenzie Crook and Ed Sheeran on guitars (Adam Ian Sykes and Sam Grant), Baty specialises in surreal banter between songs, insisting tonight’s show is an Abba Voyage-style hologram performance and sharing some rather questionable facts about the history of York, involving Ross Kemp and Derek Acorah.

Touring mighty new album Land of Sleeper, on the back of a fearsome live reputation that’s bagged them a sold-out crowd, Pigs x7 unleash riff-heavy epic after riff-heavy epic, splitting the difference between Motorhead’s primordial punk metal and Hawkwind’s space rock as though in search of the Platonic essence of Lemmy, served up with a big dollop of Sabbath-inspired sonic sludge.

Each song is like a set in microcosm, Big Rig, for example, switches on a dime from Idles-like punk ranting about miserable English towns, to a heavy doom-laden riff breakdown, to an outro that almost approaches Funkadelic territory, with cosmic guitar soloing against the perpetual motion rhythm section of John-Michael Hedley on bass and Ewan Mackenzie on drums.

Resistance is futile, these are songs you can get lost inside. Without a single overt political statement in sight, there’s something about the raging absurdism and fury of Pigs x7’s music that seems exactly right for these times.

Their skewed take on rock is rooted in the creativity of a Newcastle scene that includes the likes of Richard Dawson – who they regularly collaborate with. That’s reflected in their choice of support act, Me Lost Me, solo performer Jayne Dent – on the face of it an unlikely figure to be sharing a stage with Pigs x7s’ teetering stacks of tube amps, but a kindred spirit with an unconventional take on folk music, live-looping ancient-sounding vocal melodies against groaning sub bass and electronics.

Everyone leaves with Pigs x 7s live experience blasted into their brains, but a fair few of them will also be investigating her back catalogue – just as soon as they get their hearing back.