Chat Pile – Cool World
Chat Pile’s specialty is existential horror. Sludge or noise, it doesn’t matter—taxonomy doesn’t have the same purchase here. While their 2022 debut album God’s Country was a palpable exploration of awe-inspiring despair and grief, cast in the often oppressive modern American landscape, Cool World provides a continuity from that stellar first album, thematically and sonically, moving from the external to the internal self, and from a relentlessly noxious tone to a smattering of quieter passages.
That relentlessness hasn’t gone anywhere on Cool World. In many ways, their approach has ascended into a desperate, filthy terror. Opening track “I Am Dog Now” escalates from a warm electronic palette into pummeling, stuttering assault. Frontman Raygun Busch’s contorted vocal patterns are forced through gritted teeth, grinding and chewing on every manic syllable. At times, his vocals are coming from an ulcerous tenor, wounded even. A tired bark. A slurred, cadence resembling a preacher’s sermon. All backed by drummer Cap’n Ron’s percussive suite with every kick drum popping like a shattered rib bone. The entire song is anguished, ridden with Chat Pile’s signature maelstrom.
Theirs is a sound that tends to draw familiar comparisons to other pioneers of noise rock: The Jesus Lizard, Big Black, even Flipper’s disaffected sound, but channeled with greater intent. Focused. Chat Pile has reached a more sizable audience in part because of their ability to craft a unique take on noise rock that is distinct from their contemporaries. They have a specific sonic acuity, a track like “Shame” serving as a prime example, allowing for an approach that resembles more conventional verses to linger until transitioning into guttural, pained screaming and pure bedlam, but with a modicum of control. All due to wildly impressive instrumentation.
Luther Manhole’s guitar work carries with it hypnotic, cold, grinding spells, but also warmer tonalities, “Frownland” being a perfect encapsulation of this, or the equally textured, pinched and pulled strings on “Tape,” which oscillates from tinny to cutting like a bandsaw. Bassist Stin doesn’t miss a single opportunity to let every note crunch into a wall of oppressive, violent sludge. Both musicians’ efforts color the entirety of the work, which possesses a greater continuity of tone and energy than their debut or early EPs.
Yet Cool World lifts a veil both musically and lyrically, shedding a layer after certain tracks while never losing its grinding procession and often building toward new calamities. “Camcorder” and “Masc” leave ample room for detached vocals, bare registers following a harmony that comes across as clean, but at its base, there’s something more jarring behind every utterance. The Shakespearean titled “The Milk of Human Kindness” or the lyrics from “Masc” particularly present a distinct vulnerability. A line such as “I caught you laughing again/ I know I’m lower than scum” and the nearly muted, repeated chorus of “Trust and bleed/I” have an eerie intensity because of how quietly they’re stated. “Masc” and its depiction of the interior self, bleeding, free and utterly terrified of others, is not just an ode to but rather an anthem for the introspective trauma that permeates throughout the album.
This dialogue is an expansion of Chat Pile’s prior explorations. The withering soul and tenuous grasp on reality find a plain, gory expression here in so many lyrics that detail the atrocities of existence, maybe even existence itself under a microscope of malaise and spite. “The New World,” a masterful track on its own, thunderous and concussive, has lyrics that strip to the bone: “To be lost, To be whole, To be bought, To be sold/ To lose hope, To lose god/To find hate/To find law/Most are dragged/ Most are dragged kicking and screaming out.” These lyrics are not ornate or layered in poesy—it’s a minimalist grit, something that you could utter in or after a nightmare.
“No Way Out” the album’s closer, ends exactly as you think it would, given the trajectory of what precedes it: spittle ridden vocalizations, fluttery siren’s wail guitars, chest caving percussive and bass punches—a firm summation of the album. Its title is what its lyrics convey. There is no opportunity to mince words, to mince sound, it’s honest, with no pretense. There is no way out. There never has been. There never will be. Life is terminal after all. Of course, something about Chat Pile has always had a sort of candor of what is at first a nervous humor, and soon eclipses itself into realms of horror. A morbid joke, and then an unburdened scream.
Cool World, much like God’s Country, is abundant in malice, spite and an ironic contortion of the world around us. It’s not a mirror held up to anything—it’s a void, unscalable, primed to be filled with whatever the listener wants. Is it an act of detached, ironic humor? Sure. Is it pained, intensive despondent nihilism given sonic form? Absolutely. Let it be what it is to you. Cool World is an observation, a glimpse into an abyssal torrent. Like works of extreme cinema, music, literature or art only whispered about for their complexities, it’s the kind of work that provokes conversation—but much more challenging and fulfilling to simply experience it.
Label: Flenser
Year: 2024
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Chat Pile : Cool World
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