“Wrong side of the bed metal.” That’s another way to denote bands who have one mood and one mood only: PISSED. (And we had to put it in all caps.) It seems a lot of these Southern Lord bands are more angry than normal; perhaps the label is shortchanging them on their royalties or something, whatever those are in this day and age. Nevertheless, the full-throttle, totally-aggro sounds of the likes of Black Breath, Nails, and the band in question, All Pigs Must Die have come to embody how utterly cranky d-beat deathcrust can be. Nothing Violates This Nature is definitely all of that.
Without even having read the accompanying bio for Nothing Violates This Nature, DR knew that Converge dude Kurt Ballou was behind the boards…and he was. The go-to guy for the current wave of like-minded (and sounding) bands, Ballou knows how to cultivate some unseemly sounds, which helps All Pigs Must Die through their attempts at playing punkified death metal. Jams like “Chaos Arise,” the grinding “Primitive Fear,” and “Holy Plague” all engage themselves in rage, along with a balanced diet of post-Discharge-meets-Entombed riffs. It’s a racket.
The album takes longer than your garden variety deathcrust platter, primarily due to the space provided on “Faith Eater,” which after a raucous beginning, descends into backbeat doom. A rare deviation from the course? Yes. But it’s still pissed regardless. The whole thing is pissed. PISSED.