Genre : Noise rock, Sludge metal, Industrial
Released : July 29th, 2022
Label : Flenser Records
FFO : Godflesh, Daughters, KoЯn, Nirvana, Primitive Man, Thou
The first time I heard about Chat Pile was through their last year's split EP with Portrayal of Guilt. At the time I just thought their band name sounded a bit weird but didn't really pay any more mind to them after that.
That is until their first full-length "God's Country" was released and the amount of praise coming from both press outlets and fans was practically unavoidable.
So between that and the intriguing album art, I knew I had to eventually find out for myself why everyone was collectively loosing it over this LP.
As it turns out, a "chat pile" is a term used to describe a mound of toxic mineral waste rejected by lead and zinc mining operations; a lot of which were present in the band's home state of Oklahoma during the first half of the last century, yet now remain part of the landscape as abandoned contaminated wastelands.
Right from the get-go, without even hitting the play button, a few things about the band and the album are made clear : they are grounded in their local, Oklahoma City urban environment and don't shy away from its unglamorous reality and we can already get a taste of their sizzling irony and social satire when comparing the album's title "God's Country" with its album cover depicting an ugly yet oddly symmetrical juxtaposition of power lines and electrical generators in front of what seems to be a prison block complete with a port-a-potty. This photograph evokes anything but the presence of the holy and spiritual, if anything it displays the absence of God from a country he has long deserted.
And indeed, as the album unfolds, that idea is alive within every note and every word throughout what can only be described as an aural downward spiral into the darkest corners of the human mind, as well as the bleak and harsh reality of a deficient society that breeds everyday horrors.
Chat Pile don't beat around the bush and fire things off with "Slaughterhouse" which describes the inhumane reality of the industrial manufacturing of mass-produced meat from the perspective of a slaughterhouse worker that finds himself deeply traumatized by the gruesome daily horrors of his job with hard-hitting lines such as : "You never forget their eyes" or "There's more screaming than you'd think".
Musically speaking, the things that struck me right away were the humongous-sounding bass tone which seems to hammer in the already hard-hitting lyrics even more to highlight the heavy and disturbing subject matters being addressed; and then of course there's the erratic, blood-curdling style of the vocal delivery that exists somewhere between spoken-word, yells, shrieks, growls, unnerving singing that feigns to be tone-deaf and sounds like the drunken soliloquies of a man filled with grief, frustration, anger and self-loathing on the brink of a full-scale mental breakdown.
Although perhaps not the center-piece of Chat Pile's songwriting, both drums and guitar are essential in creating that sensation of unavoidable mounting dread the band is able to conjure through the heavily reverbed, electronic-sounding sharp drums and the layers of dissonant atmosphere strummed by a guitar that emphasizes the record's depressing spleen.
Yeah, if you couldn't tell already , "God's Country" is a heavy album in more senses than one and might flat-out require its own trigger-warning for any listeners prone to being more vulnerable to some of its dark topics such as homicide, drug abuse and suicide.
Things don't get any lighter from here, as I mentioned earlier this truly is a downward spiral that keeps the listener captive to its bitter end, as the album moves on to its second track "Why" which adresses one of the biggest injustices of the modern world : homelessness. However, as frontman "Raygun Busch" goes on what sounds more like an impassioned rant than a song, repeatedly asking out "why" do people have to live outside, it becomes apparent that the real horror doesn't lie in the already horrible hardships homeless people endure daily, but rather lies in the fact that homelessness is just this thing we as a society have collectively accepted exists as a normal part of it and have become unphased by this shameful reality when we do in fact "have the ressources, we have the means" to make it not so.
Only two songs in and Chat Pile have given us plenty to be pissed off about in a way that is so stirring it would prompt you to take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror.
Third track "Pamela" veers away from more openly social-justice infused themes for a slow-burning yet gritty narrative told from the perspective of a parent drowning their own child and having to live with that for the rest of their lives as Raygun repeats in a deadpan tone : "So I stare at the lake ; Waiting to die" while the bass once again bludgeons the brutality of the song's story into our ears and the guitar adds depth to the existentially heavy and depressing nature of the track.
As the album trudges on, themes of crippling drug addiction ("Wicked Puppet Dance"), the overbearing social pressure to "succeed" ("Tropical Beaches, Inc.") and drawing parallels between the chain slaughtering of animals mentioned in the opening track and the chain slaughtering of human beings seen from the dehumanizing perspective of serial killer Roger Dale Stafford as he (Raygun) repeatedly yells the order to : "Line up the animals".
"God's Country" begins to reach a close with its oppressive, anxiety-inducing interlude "I Don't Care If I Burn" which consists of Chat Pile's lead singer expressing deep hatred towards an unknown interlocutor as he details his plans of revenge and seemingly acts upon it while any form of instrumentation is entirely replaced with creepy field recordings of what sounds like someone wrapping another person in duct tape while breathing down their neck and eerily sing-songing derangedly in their ear.
This sets the stage for the album's unnerving finale "grimace_smoking_weed.jpg" which brings to mind tracks like KoЯn's "Daddy" or Slipknot's "Iowa" in the sense that it starts off as a structured, planned-out track but as the narrator's own sanity and mental stability degrades, so does any kind of sense of order or structure and we are left listening to the schizophrenic, paranoid, suicidal ramblings of a broken man haunted by a fabrication of his own tortured mind.
The most disturbing thing is how believable, raw and authentic the band's lead vocalist sounds as he repeatedly yells "I don't wanna be alive anymore. Do you?". Upon my first listen of the album, during its opening few minutes my thoughts were that the vocal delivery sounded a little excessively over-theatrical, but by the time I had reached the album's closing track, I was genuinely concerned about this man's well-being as well as my own.
Although throughout the record, "Raygun" constantly sounds like he's either on the verge of tears or violently lashing out before collapsing or offing himself, on "grimace" it genuinely feels like listening to an unpredictable, mentally-ill, emotionally broken person with nothing to loose who could become erratic any second if something rubs him the wrong way; which echoes back to the track "Why" since sadly, there are a lot of mentally ill people who are in dire need of intensive medical care and supervision yet call the streets their home.
The songs on "God's Country", despite all having their own narrative, could all be seen as part of the same story given the overlapping nature of their themes and how they all seem to stem from the same thing : the brokenness of a faulty societal model and the impact of capitalism upon the lives and mental health of ordinary people.
Who knows, perhaps the "Slaughterhouse" worker is the same narrator following this manic pursuit of success in "Tropical Beaches, Inc." who slowly develops a strong drug addiction ("Wicked Puppet Dance") and eventually murders his own family he has worked so hard to provide for ("Pamela" / "The Mask") and is eventually driven insane by the weight of all these things and hallucinates one last time before being cornered into suicide as a result.
But narrative theories aside, one thing that is certain is that the combination of those ideas/themes adressed by Chat Pile along with their both bludgeoning and distressing sound made up from bits and pieces of noise rock, sludge, industrial, death metal and even grunge make for one of 2022's most upsetting and harrowing listens that grasps the listener in its world of nihilistic, overbearing existential dread; making it one of the most impactful releases of the year that is sure to leave a mark.
In spite of how bleak and dark it is, "God's Country" has become one of my favourite recent discoveries and biggest musical obessions at an alarming rate and is sure to find its way among my favourite releases of the year.