Following hot on the heels of his new album Red Room, which was released in May, industrial rock mainstay Raymond Watts aka PIG has reissued a fully remastered version of his seminal mid-'90s album Sinsation via Metropolis Records (CD, digital) and Armalyte Industries (vinyl). Out of print for almost three decades, it makes a timely reappearance just ahead of a North American tour.
Sinsation was originally released in 1995 on Nothing Records, the label established by Nine Inch Nails kingpin Trent Reznor, and not long after PIG had opened for Nine Inch Nails at several shows. Nothing was an influential and commercially successful label with a cult underground following that also issued records by Marilyn Manson, Squarepusher, Autechre, Meat Beat Manifesto, Pop Will Eat Itself, Einstürzende Neubauten and Plaid, as well as Nine Inch Nails themselves.
Sinsation features PIG classics such as "Painiac", "Hamstrung On The Highway" and "Hot Hole", with Watts adeptly blending the profound and the profane. As ever, he and his carefully chosen cohorts tease, taunt, tempt and tantalise with their singular blend of hook-laden, genre-bending, electronic-tinged alternative rock, loaded with malevolent reverence, glitz, glamour, sleaze, sin and swing.
"Every record I make is PIG through a different noose, and when I made Sinsation the noose hung high", recalls Watts. "It was born at Ranch Apocalypse in London. The culmination of creation and cremation, an apotheosis of desperation, nihilism and desire, the only place I could go was to the poison well and drink deeply. I was locked inside both the studio and myself. The barricades were up in my fortress of solitude with only (guitarist) Steve White and a large box of drugs for company. Sinsation was the sound of the last card turning and burning. The only way out was through. I had to give birth to the noise inside my head and record it. A fiendishly simple and yet simply fiendish task. A place in which I was so uncomfortable that success would be to fail, as to fail had been my only success."
"Sinsation wasn't anything about the ascent of man, it was the descent of ham", Watts continues. "As surely as everything passes, so did the spotlight on sin, as the long thin shadow that scratched the words from deep within and conducted the chaos would soon cast its darkness on a new vision. PIG would crawl to a different master in me and hang from a new noose."
Regarding the newly mastered version, he adds: "I was surprised and saddened to re-visit Sinsation. Surprised by the energy and invention and saddened to hear the pain. But, I was strangely glad to have visited hell, and blessed that I didn't stay." Link
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