Review: Chat Pile – Cool World

Chat Pile
Cool World
The Flenser
Street: 10.11
Chat Pile = Botch + Coalesce ^ Primus (?)

Oklahoma noise-rock-for-hardcore-fans quartet Chat Pile have crafted the most sonically and thematically appropriate record for being afraid of watching the world burn while simultaneously hoping that it does because the state of everything is so unfathomably fucked. Cool World sounds like how it feels to truly come to terms with the nature of the most grievous manmade horrors eroding humanity. This is the album I’d like to have on in the background when I finally snap and disassociate into a murderous rage after which I can’t recall a thing.

Chat Pile’s geographic positioning in the more relatively rural south adds a layer of uniquely American class tension to their music, exemplified by their selection of artwork for almost their entire discography: low-saturation photographs of common sightings when driving through a small Southern or Midwestern town—a truck with an anti-hair loss ad, a model tank, a wooden cross, a humble convenience store sign, a billboard that reads “hot dogs cause cancer”—all against a background of a flat rural landscape that shows both development and desolation. 

Part of what makes Chat Pile so sonically brutal is the role of the bass in the driver’s seat of their most bone-chilling tracks. The opening Primus-esque bass line of “I Am Dog Now,” which leads the track through to the end, grabs the listener by the shirt collar and lets them know it only gets worse (read: better) from here on out. It’s nauseating and addicting. “Frownland” opens much the same with an intoxicating bass lick that kicks things off on its own before becoming the foundation that upholds droning, noisy guitar and unsettling spoken word that devolves into anguished screams. Interestingly, the guitar becomes more melodic as the vocals grow more insane, as if each member is taking turns being in states of chaos before the track culminates in a frenzied noise-fest of a finale. The progression of these tracks—also present in the remaining majority of the album—is as if the descent into a complete mental breakdown could be encapsulated audibly. Up and down, back and forth, wavering in intensity a bit before reaching a boiling point of passionate insanity. 

There’s a crushing dissonance throughout Chat Pile’s work that peaks in Cool World—a tone reminiscent of Southern sludge greats Eyehategod that is what the sheer misery of drug withdrawal would sound like if it could be described only by a guitar. Sludge is far from the only genre Chat Pile pulls from to efficiently encapsulate humanity’s most miserable experiences as mere sounds. In “Milk of Human Kindness,” we hear accents of grunge and shoegaze ramping up the emotional intensity, despite the track’s relatively more mellow sound below much more tenderly sung vocals than we’ve come to expect from the group thus far. When Chat Pile moves away from noise and chaos and toward melody, they’re somehow more unnerving than ever.  

Post-punk elements are sprinkled throughout the record to ramp up the atmosphere of hopelessness. “Shame” is among the more melodic tracks on Cool World; a chorus pedal goth-ifies the melancholy riff laying beneath the chorus: “And the world was quaking open with all our fathers smiling / And the statues rose high above us and God remained silent.” Chat Pile is not about to let a listener get comfortable, though, so they escalate from mourning to unbridled rage in a breakdown fit to crowdkill to. “Tape” incorporates this similar spooky guitar styling with funky bass beneath, creating an intriguing platform on which the repeated cries of “If I could I’d kill them all” and “It was the worst I ever saw” stand tall.  

Vocalist Raygun Busch’s manic ramblings—sometimes repetitive, sometimes stream-of-consciousness—are oddly reminiscent of Serj Tankian’s erratic yet carefully crafted and politically charged vocals taken taken through their fullest range in each track. We listen to a man’s political rage gradually unfold into series’ of audible meltdowns and comedowns marked by raw lyrics from the heart that mirror the feelings many of us prefer to suppress. The band’s socio-political angst is not only understood through the raw and powerful lyricism, but can be heard and felt through each note (or lack thereof). The frustration and disillusionment from their home state’s culture, marred by evangelical bigotry worsening in the current political climate, is audible. Chat Pile use repetition very intentionally with escalating intensity—they could write more lyrics, but they don’t need to, and the emotional knife they’re twisting into the listener’s chest would be dulled if they did. 

The band that brought us “grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg” brings a brutal and unpretentious  exploration of the shared suffering brought upon by the side effects of being a normal, miserable person living under a collapsing empire leaving impoverished children’s severed limbs in its wake while us cogs are expected to carry on as usual. Chat Pile’s honest nihilism regarding the bleakness of our reality resonates with the disillusioned and enraged who are still wondering why people have to live outside. –Emma Anderson

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