There’s so much more playing with dynamics than on the average grindcore record, songs ranging from twenty second bursts of speed like ‘Ghost of a Bullet’ and ‘Murder Blossom’ to the five minute dread-soaked doom of ‘Starbelly’. There’s the staccato stops and starts of ‘Tickets to the Car Crash’ and the tight quadruplets of ‘Junkyard God’ following the looseness of the drum intro on the total other end of the scale (Brian Harvey abuses his kit across the board giving an incredible performance), ‘Trojan Whore’ and ‘Naked Trees’ display a more thrash-informed brand of adrenaline, while ‘Sheet Metal Girl’ and the stunning snaking groove of ‘Strangled With a Halo’ reek of not just pure violence but a genuine stomach-churning sickness. A large part of this is due to Scott Hull, who decisively proves the power of the riff even in music this hyperactive and unwilling to stay in one place for long. Once the ravenous ‘Cheerleader Corpses’ explodes into life, this is delivered tenfold. As usual within grind songs are dessicated and disposed of in wicked time, but the tracks here display a remarkable sense of identity, managing to form an enormously cohesive half an hour of skull-splitting barbarity without the songs blurring into each other into harsh mush. Hayes’ short story focused on the recurring character of Jennifer and the torturous hypersexual “performance” she indulges in with an unfortunate, but seemingly complying victim, the disparity between the neutral computerised voice and the disgusting scene it paints certainly setting the mood for a disconcerting experience, amplified as a wave of mechanised noise begins to creep behind the voice and cause eyes to widen in anticipation of what’s to come.

It certainly begins in unconventional style with the text-to-speech voice reading of vocalist/lyricist J.R. Released at the dawn of the 2000s during a period of real creative upsurge for grindcore and extreme metal as a whole after the comparative doldrums of the late 90s and coming from a band relatively low-key within the scene, alongside works by Nasum among others Prowler in the Yard really proved that far from being a one-dimensional exercise in noisy savagery, grindcore could be as ferociously imaginative and boundary-pushing as any other style. Reissues and re-releases always offer an easy excuse to dive back into records with importance and standing long established within the musical landscape, and few albums are more deserving of this time than Pig Destroyer‘s Prowler in the Yard.

Pig destroyer prowler in the yard rar