review: Pillaging Villagers - "peasant metal" from the U.S.

Pillaging Villagers

Pillaging Villagers

11 March 2022

The Wisconsin cheesehead man Dave Frazer —who when things are going wrong in life likes to scream out “What the hell is going on out here? Everybody grabbing out there, nobody tackling. Just grabbing everybody. Grab, grab, grab! Nobody tackling!”— has been working on something that he and Aaron Rodgers like to call “peasant metal.” In the off-season Dave recruited free agent drummer Jason Hirt (from Ghost Bath, the band from Chongqing, China, a city in North Dakota), puffy-shirt pirate guitarist Brian Koenig (Lords of the Trident/Luna Mortis/The Ottoman Empire) and bassist Adam Tucker (A Scanner Darkly) for the offensive line of Pillaging Villagers. This debut game for Pillaging Villagers is rather impressive. As a growler and screamer Dave used to take over the bar stages in Madison and other cities in Wisconsin with his old team Erebus, a grooving growling type of franchise.

Nowadays Dave is taking Pillaging Villagers into the field as an angry mob with song titles that read like protest march signs, like “Wretched of the Earth,” “Burn the Monastery,” or “Smash the Factory.” The guitar sound is something like melodic extreme metal, somewhere around melodic death, black and thrash. The vocals are mostly growled, but often in the background there is the sound of a group of Irish people singing along as backing vocals. They bring in the background flute (or bagpipes or keyboards or whatever it is that they may be sampling) to add it up for a drunk, angry mob singing along “We’re gonna break the factory” and combining extreme metal with the melodies of an Irish jig. Therefore, the angry mob is angry, but they sound drunk and happy, and it looks like maybe they went to the bar before heading out to smash the factory and drank a little too much and now just want to hang out at the bar singing and drinking. However, tomorrow!, tomorrow for reals!, they gonna head to the factory and smash it, unless they find themselves at the bar again.

Expect something like melodic extreme metal in an uptempo, party way, lots of sing along moments and a little bit of the Irish (or is it drunk Finnish?) feeling. If you are looking for something fun in the area of extreme metal, then consider this your invitation to the Luddite metal of Pillaging Villagers.

Pillaging Villagers by Pillaging Villagers

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