Behind the masquerade, Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo are dreaming of a kinder world. You could easily mistake the Oklahoma City sludge band’s snarling songs about abattoirs and filicide as sadistic, but their most anthemic track is a raw entreaty to end the housing crisis, Raygun Busch’s voice stretched and cracked as he screams, “Why do people have to live outside?” Pedigo, a fingerstyle guitarist from the Texas panhandle, has often played the trickster, but his antics have always been undercut by a deep empathy. A joke campaign video he made at age 24 for a seat on the Amarillo, Texas City Council sparked an earnest bid for office against an elitist incumbent. And in recent years his Instagram grid has transitioned away from photos of himself dressed as highway billboards to open-hearted mini-essays about stage fright, grief, and why he writes essays on Instagram.
Shared compassion is at the core of Pedigo and Chat Pile’s new collaborative album, In the Earth Again. Imagining this experiment between any of the titans the two acts have respectively been compared to—John Fahey and the Jesus Lizard, or William Tyler and Eyehategod—is fun, but the common ground seems slim. Chat Pile and Pedigo’s fusion occurred last summer, when Pedigo moved from Amarillo to a house a few blocks from Chat Pile bassist Stin in OKC. And when Pedigo pitched the idea of working on a single together, Chat Pile raised the stakes to a full LP. Rather than a split—the bread and butter of the metal-industrial complex—or a Chat Pile-featuring-Pedigo record, this album is the product of a seamless synchronicity, two seemingly opposed forces combined into a single, interpenetrated entity.
In the Earth Again is set at a glacial pace, allowing each element to coalesce in its own time. The first two tracks descend into murky purgatory: Instrumental opener “Outside” is led by Pedigo, his plaintive guitar backed by additional axe work from Chat Pile guitarist Luther Manhole, Busch, and Cap’n Ron, who traditionally handles percussion but plays a powerslide lap steel on some of these songs. That track flows seamlessly into “Demon Time,” a hypnotic number in which Busch prophesies the burning of all the castles in the world and the return of every demon. “And they will find you/And they will fuck you up,” he sings, his voice low and even. Despite their tranquil sound, “Outside” and “Demon Time” are all tension, no release. So when “Never Say Die!” begins with a bulldozing power chord and a nuclear kick—the first percussion on the record—it’s pure catharsis. It’s the most characteristic Chat Pile cut on the album: sludgy, detuned, and merciless.
The rest of In the Earth Again alternates between vocal-centric songs and instrumental tracks. “Behold a Pale Horse” is a Pedigo/Manhole duet full of lovely counterpoint curdled by reverb. “Fission/Fusion” begins as a noisy, jolting scrum before settling into something more Metallica adjacent. And “I Got My Own Blunt to Smoke” finds Busch alone with his guitar, seemingly interpolating Timbaland. It’s only a five-note descending scale, but Busch draws out its melodrama to an almost cartoonish degree. It’s hard to imagine that, in light of the goofy cultural references he’s sprinkled across Chat Pile’s past work, he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing.
Where field recordings and tape loops make indelible contributions to the record’s atmosphere, they fall flat on its eight-minute centerpiece, “The Matador.” “Things fall apart!” Busch yowls several times, and it’s here Chat Pile and Pedigo’s shared sensibilities hold together least. They open the song with nearly two minutes of tape loops before the drums, bass, and guitar build gradually into a monster lick. The music chugs ceaselessly but loses its punch on the home stretch. There’s a great four-minute song here, but the long closing guitar solo is gratuitous, as is the sluggish intro.
In the Earth Again is best at its simplest, in the singer-songwriter tracks at the middle and end of the record. In “The Magic of the World,” Busch’s disarmingly tender voice sits center-stage. “Before the life goes from my eyes/Before all magic is lost to time,” he sings, “You’re here with me/One more time/Until the world ends.” Then “Fission/Fusion” enters with a roar, ripping a hole in his revery. On closing track “A Tear for Lucas,” Busch stands alone again, addressing a dead friend directly. He sounds naked, stripped of his jaded façade as he sings, “You once shared the saddest thing/To cheer me up/And it haunts me.” In 14 words, he sketches a loving but troubled relationship and describes the echoing trauma of a single interaction. It’s in these songs—softer and sweeter than anything in Chat Pile’s catalog, gloomier and more foreboding than anything in Pedigo’s—that their mutual empathy radiates strongest.
