This time around they're including surprisingly catchy melodies, bombastic riffs, and galvanic rhythms, with singer Raygun Busch embodying the connection between aggression and despair. The result is a riveting sequence, the Oklahoma-based band lauding the power of creative expression while raging against existential, social, and cosmic brutalities.
If God’s Country was a focused attack on power systems, seen and unseen, Cool World is a broader take on history, intergenerational conditioning, and our current state. The band eloquently push against longstanding inequalities and injustices, all the while lamenting how the very system they rage against has been installed in their own emo-cognitive make-ups. As Bell Hooks wrote roughly 40 years ago, “The enemy within must be transformed before we can confront the enemy outside”.
In other words, conditioning – personal, collective, religious, familial – plays a large role in Cool World. “I Am Dog Now”, which reintroduces us to Chat Pile’s urgent tone and timbre, launches with Luther Manhole’s equally infectious and assaultive guitar parts. Busch’s voice is strained, brimming with volatility and exhaustion. “You see nothing”, he snarls, commenting on the smugness of the world, the way each of us exists in an egoic bubble (or well-decorated cage). When he moans the title phrase, he plunges into a blend of neurotic machismo and frazzled dejection a la Korn’s Jonathan Davis. He points the finger at us and himself. Instrumentally, the band is at its tightest, making rhythmic shifts effortlessly, Manhole pivoting between riffy progressions and noisily melodic interludes.
With “Shame”, the band demonstrate their chemistry, moving between propulsive rhythms and elegant flourishes. Occasionally the sound recalls You Won’t Get What You Want-era Daughters, though Chat Pile is more instrumentally precise, even crystalline (despite the heavily distorted guitars). Busch is more overtly accusatory (than Alexis Marshall) and more prone to a full-blown rant/rave (as well as a well-placed and disturbing lycanthropic growl). “Frownland” finds Chat Pile working squarely in the metal realm, transitioning from one fleshed out audial sketch to another. The track (and album as a whole) shows the band at their most polished and integrated, though a sense of immediacy is rarely, if ever sacrificed.
The longest track of the sequence, “Camcorder” spotlights the band as they navigate austere segments and post-hardcore explorations. Busch channels a bellicose Jim Morrison circa American Prayer (imagine Morrison if he lived through Covid, the Trump years, read The 1619 Project, and participated in a diversity awareness program facilitated by Henry Rollins). Midway, the band lands on thunderous progressions that reconfigure the Black Sabbath playbook. On “Tape”, perhaps the most purely visceral study of the sequence, Busch offers some of his most spellbinding vocals, screaming, pleading, cursing, breaking down, the metal counterpart to Porridge Radio’s Dana Margolin. When he repeats “It was the worst I ever saw” over and over, he turns the line into a nightmarish mantra, an insistence that people emerge from their trances, become aware of the suffering all around them (the track builds thematically on “Why” from God’s Country, which viscerally addresses homelessness).
“Masc” is a self-deprecating and cynical take on being an outsider. Busch puts out implosive and explosive vibes, the band segueing from chorus-dabbed and pseudo-orchestral passages to a more threatening and conventionally metal MO. “I trust and bleed”, Busch moans, as Manhole winds his wiry guitar around Stin’s thumping/staccato bass. As with “I Am Dog Now”, he operates as an Everyperson in a Theater of Cruelty (Antonin Artaud would approve), reflecting how conditioning works, how we accept our suffering, convinced that the payoff we’ve been promised is right around the corner, if we can just hold on a little longer. “Milk of Kindness”, meanwhile, exemplifies the band’s appreciation for sludge. The song drags like a wounded behemoth, a pissed-off Sphinx coming to life, a megalodon waking in the depths, heading for the closest beach.
With Cool World, as with God’s Country, Chat Pile are informed by canonic metal, hardcore, punk, and rock, at the same time transcending (and often exceeding) their sources. Manhole, Stint, and Cap’n Ron deftly balance unbridled belligerence and strategic restraint. As a frontman, Busch exemplifies the contemporary chameleon who relates to the woes of the world, who serves as a mirror and martyr of sorts, solidifying, dissolving, and resolidifying before our eyes. Cool World is instrumentally gripping, vocally enthralling, and lyrically calls out the horrors of late-stage capitalism.
