I gotta be honest, I don’t know what I like more about Hog, the free-for-all sludge or the name. It’s so simple, but it says so much about who the band are and what they do. If I came up to you on the street (wouldn’t that be awkward) and said, “Hey man, you gotta check out this band from North Carolina, they’re called Hog,” you’d have a pretty good idea of what you were getting into, right? I think that’s killer.

Hog have two demo tracks posted on their MySpace, “On the Eve of War” and “A Word is Born,” and yeah, they definitely sound like demos, but the recordings are clear enough for you to get an idea of what Hog are going for. They play a kind of post-Mastodon thrashing sludge (think Javelina, but a little riffier), hitting tempo changes on the quick to keep listeners on edge and making good use of R. James‘ lead guitar. They’re new school, yeah, and there are other bands out there doing this kind of thing, but I ask you, are they named Hog? No they are not. So there you go. Hog wins.

And it’s not like they’re annoyingly derivative. They just have some growing to do. According to the MySpace, they’re slated to head into the studio for a session with none other than Kylesa‘s Philip Cope at the helm. One imagines that someone of his boardly prowess should have no problem bringing the best out of a band like Hog, and that the righteous groove that caps off “A Word is Born” will be all the more lethal for time spent getting it right. Here’s looking forward to hearing how it all comes out.

Tags: Durham, Hog, North Carolina, Unsigned bands

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 at 3:14 pm and is filed under On the Radar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.