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Review & Video Premiere: Deville, Pigs with Gods

deville pigs with gods

Deville, ‘Cut it Loose’ official video premiere

[Click play above to watch the official premiere of Deville’s ‘Cut it Loose’ video. Their album, Pigs with Gods, is out Oct. 26 on Fuzzorama Records.]

Sweden’s Deville seemed to lay self-aware claim to their straightforward approach to heavy rock and roll on their last album, 2015’s Make it Belong to Us (review here), which was their first outing through Fuzzorama Records after issuing their third LP, Hydra (review here), through Small Stone. But things change, and in the case of the Malmö four-piece, that extends to the lineup of the band, as guitarist/vocalist Andreas Bengtsson is now the sole remaining founding member of Deville, with lead guitarist Andreas Wulkan having joined before Hydra and the dual-Martin rhythm section of bassist Martin Nobel and drummer Martin Fässberg coming aboard in 2016. As Deville come upon their 15th anniversary in 2019, their latest collection, Pigs with Gods, will be the album that carries them through it, and it’s another forward step in their ongoing sonic development.

As to how much the Andreases and Martins share writing duties among them, I don’t know, but Deville has always had Bengtsson at the center, and that remains true throughout the substantial, LP-limit-pushing 12 tracks and 51 minutes of Pigs with Gods, but as cuts like “Came for Nothing,” “Hell in the Water,” “Cut it Loose” and “Gold Sealed Tomb” remind, the star when it comes to Deville‘s work has always been the songs themselves. Structurally tight, crisply produced and executed with a full, professional sound and energy, the material on Pigs with Gods offers little by way of surprises in the overall quality of its work. That is, after their last couple albums especially and even going back to 2007’s Come Heavy Sleep (which Heavy Psych Sounds pressed to vinyl in 2013) and 2009’s Hail the Black Sky (discussed here), they’ve worked to a high standard of output. With Bengtsson as the consistent factor in the band all along, one can at this point read a certain level of auteurship to their work, but again, it’s the songwriting that’s the proper focus.

And whether it’s the lumbering riffer “Lightbringer” or the one-two punch of opener “Lost Grounds” and the title-track right behind it, Pigs with Gods wants nothing as regards songwriting. The real shift as regards Deville‘s style is in the aggression level of the material overall. “Lost Grounds” puts that out immediately and sets a context for the rest of what follows such that even the uptempo push of “Cut it Loose” or the bombastic “Wrecked” later on seem informed by it. They play around with the dynamic, as one would think for a group of their established professionalism, and “Acid Meadows” mellows out while “Dead Goon” turns it somewhat darker ahead of “Came for Nothing” and the ending shove of “Medicated on a Concrete Road” and closer “In Reverse,” which tops six minutes in grand finale fashion with a striking vocal harmony, but the core tonality of Pigs with Gods — and even the title itself, unless they’re referencing Margaret Atwood — retains more of an aggro edge than anything they’ve done before.

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The effect there is to toe the line between heavy rock and hard rock, and taken in concert with the accessibility that their penchant for hooks grants them, one might read a commercial aspect to their sound, but I don’t think that’s what they’re going for. Whether they’re reflecting the times or some personal strife or whatever it might be, their intention seems not to make the widest-reaching album possible, but to push themselves into making the best album possible, and while Pigs with Gods is a considerable undertaking at 51 minutes — Make it Belong to Us was 37, to compare — they stave off redundancy with malleability and succeed in moving their aesthetic forward to someplace it’s never been. As to how much the arrival of Nobel and Fässberg might have to do with the sharper take, I can’t say, but it’s crucial that even as raucous as Pigs with Gods gets, on “Gold Sealed Tomb” or  “Wrecked” or even “Lost Grounds” at the outset, there’s no sacrifice of melody or catchiness in the name of making a show of being pissed off.

Nor should there be. Instead, Deville hit this new nuance in their modus with the same level of pro-shop confidence they’ve had for the better part of the last decade, and I firmly believe that’s because they keep the songs themselves as the core of the band. At no point does Pigs with Gods sound like Bengtsson sat WulkanFässberg and Nobel down at a band meeting and told them it was time to get mad. What it sounds like is that Deville wrote a new collection of tracks to follow-up the last one and the songs went where they wanted to go naturally. I’ve mentioned a couple times by now Pigs with Gods hitting expectations. In songwriting, in performance, etc. And it does, but that shouldn’t be taken to mean that it lacks passion or that it’s somehow otherwise flat, just hitting its marks and content with that. While there are steady elements to their approach and I wouldn’t say they ever come close to losing their tight grip on what they do, Deville are just working to a high standard, and surpassing where they were before is a part of that.

One would expect no less from them, no matter who’s in the band, or it simply wouldn’t be Deville. And with the rolling-forward riff of “Dead Goon” and the spacious time-taking of “In Reverse” — the bass of which is satisfyingly dirt-caked in its post-midpoint showcase — Pigs with Gods is unquestionably Deville. It shows how recognizable their sound has become over time and just how much the ownership they acknowledged their last time out has allowed them to do what they want with their songwriting and take it to places it hasn’t yet been. Whatever the future holds for them as they move beyond a decade and a half — one assumes they won’t have another album out next year, given past pacing — Deville give zero sign of letting go of the willfully grounded craft that serves as their foundation. As regards Pigs with Gods, it is only a source of strength for what they do.

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Deville website

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