Critic's Choice

Pigface is: a) a deviant sexual practice akin to the "Cleveland Steamer"; b) the newest Denny's breakfast special; or c) a loose-knit industrial-music collective based around former Ministry drummer Martin Atkins. Well, it's mostly c), depending on what you're into. The rotating cast that Atkins periodically assembles has included Frank Black, Dean Ween, Meg Lee Chin (who appropriates Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" on the towering "Nutopia"), Flea and Trent Reznor -- a talented bunch of weirdos by any measure. Lately, Atkins's fluid musical beast has seemed to play whatever the group finds fun at the time rather than adhering to any proscribed dogma. Sliding around the spine of industrial noise are ropes of musical muscle that draw on elements of jazz, electronica, classical and hip-hop. It's hard-edged, like well-worn concrete, yet it's prettily poetic, too -- anarchic in a way the music industry could never understand. But Atkins's label, Invisible Records (which just released Preaching to the Perverted, a two-disc Pigface best-of spanning ten years), and his loose agglomeration of anti-egos might be the future of music. They'll just have to drag the biz along with them, kicking and screaming, or leave it behind. Pigface appears at the Ogden Theatre on Friday, December 14, with Gravity Kills, Godhead, Meg Lee Chin and Chris Connelly.