Life on Earth is bleak. You may be lucky enough to be shielded from it, for now, but incredible suffering is all around you, and it’s coming for you someday too. You will die. Everyone you love will die. If you’re lucky, your own demise will happen quickly, but more likely your personal wellbeing will take an extreme downturn before then, until you barely recognize yourself anymore. Some of your most treasured relationships will decay into alienation and loathing. Addiction, homelessness, and abuse are lurking around every corner. Your body will fail you in increasingly gruesome and painful ways. The planet will continue to lash out at its stewards in apocalyptic fashion, upending what you thought was a safe and secure existence. The devastating warfare that could only happen there, not here, will someday swallow up your little patch of paradise. Rather than working to prevent these outcomes, many in power will reinforce systems that guarantee them. Numbness and despair will reign.
The more you understand all that, the more you understand Chat Pile. The Oklahoma City band’s music stares unflinchingly at life’s darkest realities, reflecting them back in music that is heavy in every sense. God’s Country, Chat Pile’s 2022 full-length debut, made them fast-rising stars among listeners with a taste for the gnarled and grotesque. The band’s low-end churn was ugly and radioactive, yet such barbarous music moved with surprising fleetness and unexpected flashes of melody, like some kind of surreal nightmare creature. Vocalist Raygun Busch spun his neuroses into freaked-out rants and muttered asides. Sometimes he descended into frantic hallucinations about, say, Grimace from McDonald’s. Other times, he could not have been more clear-eyed, as when he repeatedly screamed, “Why do people have to live outside!?” It was powerful music about impotence and futility — the Jesus Lizard fronted by the human embodiment of Nihilist Arby’s.
Cool World, the first new Chat Pile album since the band blew up, is out this Friday. It is another hulking beast of a record, one all but guaranteed to satisfy the Chat Pile faithful. Musically, the quartet flexes further mastery of its unique strain of noise-rock, sounding more locked-in than ever. Lyrically, the songs are less obviously meme-worthy but even more likely to leave you feeling queasy. Whereas God’s Country fixated on the horrors and dysfunctions particular to Chat Pile’s home region, per Busch, this time the band has widened its scope, “with thoughts specifically about disasters abroad, at home, and how they affect one another.” He occasionally turns his eye on his own failings, as on “Masc,” a study of his struggle to forge romantic connections. But mostly he zooms out and finds the outlook just as fucked.
Busch begins Cool World with a picture of subhuman existence: “Trash mouth/ Veins full of garbage/ I am dog now.” He ends it by repeatedly shouting, “No escape! No escape! No escape!” Along the way, there are many more lyrics in that spirit, phrases that guide the imagination to unsettling places. “Most are dragged kicking and screaming out,” he concludes on “The New World.” In “Funny Man,” he brims with both empathy and contempt as he announces, “Outside there’s no mercy and not everyone can hide.” Sometimes no imagination is necessary, as on “Shame,” when Busch seems to describe the horrific footage coming out of Gaza: “In their parents arms/ The kids were falling apart/ Broken tiny bodies/ Holding tiny still hearts.” On “Milk Of Human Kindness,” in one of the most haunting moments on the album, he softly sings, “I screamed about it all night/ I screamed, I screamed.”
Chat Pile weaponize these kinds of sentiments, turning anguish and anxiety into kinetic energy. It never ceases to sound elemental, but it does change shape and texture more often as the band expands its sonic terrain to go along with the subject matter. Mixed this time by Uniform’s Ben Greenberg, the music of Cool World is harsh and clattering but also tinged with a faint glow. Every drumbeat from Cap’n Ron connects with the force of someone dropping free weights at the gym. Bassist Stin and guitarist Luther Manhole match him blow for blow in the depths of the sonic pit. Implausibly, some of these heaving mounds of sound even approach anthem status thanks to the band’s command of dynamics and strategic bursts of beauty within the carnage.
Chat Pile are categorized as metal on streaming services, which is hilarious. Some songs like “I Am Dog Now” do lurch around like Clutch or Pantera, but more often the parallel is a band like Metz, whose pummeling post-hardcore is laced with subtle echoes of harmony. “Shame” is basically coldwave on creatine, Chat Pile’s racket cohering into a swift, aerodynamic current only briefly interrupted by a ghoulish death-metal breakdown. Sometimes they even get funky; the groove on “Frownland” approaches hip-hop, like Beck’s Midnite Vultures after an extinction level event, and the piercing, percussive guitar in “Tape” is like dissonant Nile Rodgers. But in keeping with Chat Pile’s worldview, none of these gestures toward fun ever obscures the atrocity that prevails all around.
On “Tape,” Busch sketches out a profile of someone surveying the unspeakable caught on video. “It was the worst I ever saw,” he declares — another moment where you’re left to wonder about the details he’s keeping to himself. Such is the role he plays in this band: processing the revolting, dismaying realities most people would rather ignore, like one of those Facebook content moderators scarred for life by all the disturbing content they’ve been privy to. “I guess someone had to see,” he later concedes. “Someone had to be horrified by what they had done.”
Cool World is out 10/11 on the Flenser.
