Pigthe’s website contains little micro-stories about things like awkward conversations and trying to chat up women by asking what their favourite Pavement LP is. They’re well-written, but seem almost pathologically obsessed with not revealing anything. It must be hard to write prose when you’ve got all your fingers crossed behind your back.
And the music isn’t dissimilar. There’s a lot of quirky potential on this album, some dinky little tunes and a sense of fun encapsulated in antediluvian drum machine patterns, but Pigthe has gone as far as they can to obscure this fact, with wilfully lo-fi sound and aggressively unfinished arrangements. Oh, and lest we forget, there’s quite probably the worst use of auto-tune we’ve heard from a local act on this CD, opener ‘Carrion (Live)’ – which is potentially a pleasing little Passenger-a-like ditty – turning each vocal cadence into the sound of the farmer leaping off a ladder in Chuckie Egg.
There are a whole raft of great things about this record – the melancholic guitar on ‘Fill In The Gaps’ the tiny guitar tickles on ‘Mephistopheles’ that sound like Foals in a matchbox, the title ‘Hip Hop Saved My Life But Now It’s Killing Itself’ – but overall the air is of an act that seems hellbent on hiding any quality behind fuzzy bedroom four track recording, perhaps in the paralysing fear that anybody might actually think they meant it. A track like ‘Any Other Name’ is a perky nugget of pop somewhere between The Housemartins and The Wedding Present, and we truly wish that more of the record captured this sense of indie pop pleasure. Go on, Pigthe: you’ve got some talent here, stand up and go for it. Try to make something great, stop using whimsy and distance as a defence mechanism. We think we could love this music, but only if Pigthe can learn to love it first.
Oh, and Pavement are shit, too.