On the cover of Chat Pile’s second full-length Cool World, a white cross looms over a grassy knoll. To the image’s right, emerald highway signs, traffic controllers and a lone Subaru interrupt what would be a spiritual scene and reveal it for what it is: a monument reminding passers-by on a highway interchange of who’s in charge (whether that is the Christian God or His devotees remains unresolved). It would also be a fitting image on Chat Pile’s pummeling debut album, God’s Country, a collection overflowing with malaise and alarm over noisy sludge. They wore their Korn worship as well as their Jesus Lizard and Eyehategod influence on their sleeves. Now, with Cool World, the Oklahoma quartet expands their putrid gaze from the country to the world as it burns under warfare and wildfire.
With the help of Ben Greenberg of Uniform, who has a knack for taking all things dark and imbuing in them a terrible iridescence not unlike the flames above a steel mill, Chat Pile fling the ambient anguishes of empire and decline back at listeners while switching between sonic bedlam and comprehensible melody. How they jostle between song and inferno reproduces the uncanny feeling of standing at the edge of a cliff, where pressure on the wrong foot can send you hurtling into an abyss. Chat Pile’s noise rock foundation is solid, but the band gleefully veers between sludge metal (“Milk of Human Kindness”) and noisy post-punk (“Shame”). “Frownland” is downright groovy, and without Raygun Busch’s screams on “Tape,” Chat Pile could be convincingly labeled funk-rock. They’re scholars of the aggressive metal and punk traditions of the Clinton and George W. Bush years, channeling that soup of aggression towards a vision of global rot.
More than once, warfare catches Chat Pile’s gaze, and they speak plainly to the atrocities made public: “In their parents arms / The kids were falling apart / Broken tiny bodies /Holding tiny still hearts,” Busch utters on “Shame.” There’s the pointless, arguably pathetic sacrifices made to become a tool of war as told on “Funny Man”: “The wicked jester is dancing and clapping / As my big strong hands kill the people they told me / There are times that I can almost believe it / I can almost imagine I was meant to do this and be here.” Less obviously obnoxious violence is the star of sibling tracks “Tape” and “Camcorder,” moments to consider how gruesome atrocities are a part of the everyday under a regime uninterested in preventing them in favor of the bottom line.
Chat Pile looks within on “Masc,” with frenetic guitar and swinging bass gnarling beneath Raygun’s comparatively nervous lyrics. He sounds like a man who wants love but lacks sureness of self, inflected with anxiety that reminds me how, to borrow a phrase, this whole thing smacks of gender. Chat Pile lean into a normie masculinity, adopting pseudonyms but performing in regular garb and maintaining low-key personas off-stage. Their presentation is approachable, even if the music is bleak. There’s something about their normality that makes their foreboding messages a hair more chilling: Out of the mouths of men in leather and corpse paint, one can expect lyrics this grim, but out of the mouths of someone who dresses like your neighbor and otherwise acts like a regular person, the human capacity for desolation is on full display. The cranks are not the only ones sensing that the world is permanently twisted.
The world according to Chat Pile is desolate and absurd. “I Am Dog Now,” something of a mutant METZ track rich with metal in its blood, is a messy stampede of an opener; the syncopated bass of closer “No Way Out” makes their reality feel less like nonsense and more like a bind. Chat Pile is a band made for those who have an idea of what’s wrong with our present and feel like they’re running out of ways to express it. Trying to improve the world feels like a doomed task. There’s nothing on this album quite as obviously anthemic as God’s Country standout “Why,” but Chat Pile’s grooves are charming enough to get one to listen along and hear them out. Once their austere message registers, it’s impossible to un-hear it.
Devon Chodzin is a Pittsburgh-based critic and urban planner with bylines at Aquarium Drunkard, Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily and more. He lives on Twitter @bigugly.
