Midway through Pile’s new album comes one of the best and most unusual protest songs of the Trump era. Its title, “The Soft Hands of Stephen Miller,” resembles an ironic in-joke. Except Pile’s singer Rick Maguire is not at all joking. Over a serrated guitar riff that sounds like a Jesus Lizard record-skip—relentlessly repeating even when every other instrument strives to sabotage it—Maguire lays into the president’s xenophobic policy advisor. It’s part diagnosis, part roast: The words “stiff pale shell,” alleged impotence, and a dig at Miller’s refugee great-grandmother all come into play. Yet there is also a nauseous glimmer of recognition. “That dude is the same age as me,” Maguire said in a recent interview, “and it’s like, what happened to you?” When the singer repeats the word “How?” in a throat-wrecking yelp, it mostly sounds like he is crying “Help!”
It’s as close to an anthem as Pile has written, though it remains staunchly unhummable. Even this band’s protest tunes are circuitous tangles of aggression and flailing limbs. Pile, the noise-rock darlings of the Boston DIY scene, achieved their cult-like measure of indie fame by touring mercilessly and doing nothing the easy way: The band has never written fist-pumping platitudes, never optioned a song for a major television show, never covered Toto. Picking up where 2017’s A Hairshirt of Purpose left off, Green and Gray employs a heightened level of studio ambition without losing its ferocious might. It is the band’s most satisfying and varied album yet.
Green and Gray reflects changes in both geography (the band moved to Nashville) and personnel (two members quit, replaced by guitarist Chappy Hull and bassist Alex Molini). Yet Kris Kuss’ pummelling work on the drums remains central to Pile’s sound, undergirding high-velocity prog-ish songs like “On a Bigger Screen” and “A Bug on its Back.” And, perhaps to match the stench of sociopolitical revulsion, Maguire summons some utterly sickening riffs: “Lord of Calendars” cracks and shakes in an odd meter and “On a Bigger Screen” sounds like a sputtering car engine trying to tell you something is horribly wrong. Both are ferocious.
There is a mournful edge to this record, too, and an increasing willingness to treat the studio as more than an aural document of Pile’s live prowess. The recording process took two weeks, and say what you will, but this is actually a long time for Pile. The resulting album incorporates considerably more atmospheric depth, including orchestral and keyboard overdubs. Pile are not growing soft, but they are growing: “Firewood,” this album’s disarming opener, finds Maguire brooding about his spent youth and gray hairs as a whining cello jostles for space in the mix. It’s lovely in the way that late-career Polvo songs can be lovely, with just the right amount of tenderness before the climax comes crashing in. “Hair” keeps its existential panic similarly subdued—the drummer even acquires brushes for the occasion.
Not every experiment lands.“Your Performance,” in particular, with its heavily treated vocals and vague allusions to a “neon cartoon” (guess who), feels limp, its crescendo somehow unearned. But everything here is caked in the blood, passion, and untamed weirdness that drew Pile’s obsessives into the cult in the first place. Maguire is very much the poster boy of the punk dude over 30, keenly aware of what it means to tour in a van when you’re old enough to seek the presidency. He does seem preoccupied with the specter of aging and the usual anxieties that accompany it. “I’m aware of my age/My impermanence and so forth,” he murmurs on “My Employer,” a callback to the album’s opening line: “No longer burdened by youth.” “My Employer” is affecting but cryptic. The song’s title alludes to music, Maguire’s profession and the apparent salve to his fear of dying: “I found fire when I was 12/It’s lasted over 20 years,” he sings. What follows, the righteous seven-minute climax “Hiding Places,” shows that the fire is still burning. Now somebody send Stephen Miller a download code.
