Manpig – The Grand Negative (Deep Six Records)
One of the most decisive points in the development of any aesthetic movement comes with the application of its apellation. Matisse and Braque took elitist derision and wore it as a badge of pride. Alan Freed took a slang term for fucking and blanketed the world with it. And, in Man Is The Bastard’s 1992 song “H.S.M.P.,” what had until that point been a term that existed as a self-styled stylistic shorthand was introduced to the world. In its introduction, vocalist Eric Wood shouts a handful of his friends’ bands’ names before tying them all together with the term “West Coast power violence.”
Manpig – The Grand Negative (Deep Six Records)
One of the most decisive points in the development of any aesthetic movement comes with the application of its apellation. Matisse and Braque took elitist derision and wore it as a badge of pride. Alan Freed took a slang term for fucking and blanketed the world with it. And, in Man Is The Bastard’s 1992 song “H.S.M.P.,” what had until that point been a term that existed as a self-styled stylistic shorthand was introduced to the world. In its introduction, vocalist Eric Wood shouts a handful of his friends’ bands’ names before tying them all together with the term “West Coast power violence.” The term wasn’t defined specifically, and the bands under that umbrella, despite all sharing an affinity for hardcore’s fastest and rawest strains, utilized disparate enough approaches that pinning power violence down to a specific sound would have proved difficult. But it was enough to solidify an identity, to let the world know that there was something being forged despite the varying approaches of its practitioners. Some employed slower sludgy elements. Some were intricate and experimental. Some were single-minded in their songs’ aesthetic approach. Some utilized abrupt transitions between tempos and moods. Some were attuned to the political zeitgeist of DIY hardcore of the era. Some focused on the psyche’s darker corners. Despite the differences, all of the bands mentioned in “H.S.M.P.” released records that are considered touchstones of the genre–except for one.
This lone outlier was Manpig – whose guitarist Matt Domino was ironically the one who had coined the term power violence in the first place, as a descriptor for his band Neanderthal (which also featured Eric Wood, who would bring the phrase to prominence several years later). Manpig had recorded an album’s worth of material in 1992 that went unused while the band attempted to find a permanent vocalist. The recordings were subsequently lost by the studio (or taped over for a Lack Of Interest album, depending on who’s telling the story) and the group disbanded. They went from a largely-unheard genre touchstone to a vague memory within a few short years, only to have their legacy become cultural currency again with the resurgence in power violence’s popularity that’s taken place in the past half-decade or so. In an attempt to prevent the songs from being forever lost to history, Domino paired up with drummer R.D. Davies (with whom he had played in the hugely influential proto-power violence band Infest) to re-record the material and, over the course of the past eight years, re-created the songs, snatching each from the jaws of obscurity.
The resulting album is nothing if not a reminder of how bracing and compelling the initial cluster of power violence bands were, though Manpig shared with their contemporaries little more than an unwillingness to sound at all like each other apart from surface-level signifiers. While The Grand Negative certainly lacks no aggression or speed, Manpig comes off more like a faster, streamlined extension of the nimble yet discordant mid-80s hardcore of Black Flag, Bl’ast, and Animosity-era Corrosion of Conformity than the grindy blasting preferred by most power violence bands. It’s not that it lacks thrashy tendencies, but for every brief burst of speed, there are equal numbers of mid-tempo and slow moments. But unlike the legions of other bands that assemble such elements into a rough patchwork of ideas, Manpig fuse them as seamlessly and gracefully as could be expected from artists who help define the style in the first place. And these aren’t simple songs either – despite their brevity, each song’s component parts twist into something off-kilter and unpredictable, a stockpile of ideas distilled to their most minimal, abrasive essence with not a second wasted or a note out of place.
It’s a testament to the music’s staying power that these songs – written twenty years ago, captured in a recording session starting almost a decade ago, and performed by people who were playing in bands before most members of the current hardcore scene were even born – still sound rawer and more genuine than almost any contemporary band. This isn’t to write The Grand Negative off as some sort of history lesson – more a demonstration of hardcore as a growing, ever-changing entity, still immured in the flux of evolution that characterizes any relevant creative force. It’s a reminder that a descriptor doesn’t have to be constrictive, that the associations that we forge and the peripheries we establish (no matter how porous) can provide a launching pad towards the freedom that comes with mastering one’s craft. And ultimately, it’s a solid set of songs, worth the twenty year wait.
