There are very few eternal truths in this world. You shouldn't be a dick to animals, shows don't start at 10pm and the internet is the shittiest place to hang out (thanks Be Bad). But there's maybe one more beyond those: Truro has housed some of the most wildly inspiring, chaotic and punishing music this region has ever been witness to. The reputedly conservative town with its reputedly conservative mayor created a context in which music that was at least weird, and at best threatening, could nest. While PIG's consummation came towards the end of those salad days, the lineage of that culture is clearly there.
"It was thrilling but very self-destructive," says Matthew Samways, guitarist and vocalist for PIG. "I am glad to have lived there but I am also happy to never return."
Samways spent his adolescence moving between provinces with his family before landing in Truro. It was those short-lived experiences in different school systems, with different peers, that imbued his youth with a sense of loneliness and transience. It's romantic, but the dude was an outsider. When he and Tyler Fleck connected early in high school, it was clear they shared a similar spirit and started making music together instantly. The result was PIG.
"I had been playing in a few punk bands, namely Genetic Angry, prior to PIG," says Fleck. "I met Matt and introduced him to Truro's music scene. We started PIG shortly after."
PIG performed its first show at "the punk house on College Road"—Samways was 15 and Fleck 16. This was where the weirdos went. It "was very much a vehicle for all the interesting stuff happening in the music community at the time. It was all new to me and very exciting," recalls Samways. "Jamming with PIG is an insane emotional and physical release and I haven't expressed myself through music like that in the five years of our absence. My knowledge and ability to sonically conduct sound has improved over this time, therefore my tones and playing is now more thought out—where as with playing back then the objective was to get as fucked up as possible and we would get this release through long noise interludes."
The same holds true for Fleck. "I haven't performed music live for five years, since PIG's last show," he says. "What is immediately apparent....is the personal release that happens when we perform together. For that reason it feels like we are coming back to it at the perfect time."
PIG recorded a handful of demos before issuing its first "real release," Elbow Witch, in 2009. Although the band played with the notion of performing together for the past year it was ultimately Samways' desire for "that sort of emotional release, aggressive I suppose," which brought the members together again.
Close your eyes, let's all release together and go back in time to the Truro Boys & Girls Club days with not as many walls of death, when PIG plays Menz Bar this Friday.
PIG w/Surveillance, Dry Heave, DJ JFM
Friday, March 27, 10pm Menz and Mollyz Bar, 2182 Gottingen Street $6
