Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, the music of Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with a sound so abrasive, unrelenting and outlandish has struck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift; a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems. Besides being the name of a largely forgotten (and panned) 90s film, Cool World makes for an apt title for Chat Pile’s sophomore full-length record. In the context of a Chat Pile record, the words are steeped in a grim double entendre that not only evokes imagery of a dying planet but a progression from the band’s previous work, moving the scope of its depiction of modern malaise from just God’s Country to the entirety of humankind.”Cool World covers similar themes to our last album, except now exploded from a micro to macro scale, with thoughts specifically about disasters abroad, at home, and how they affect one another,” says vocalist Raygun Busch. Below this article you can watch the Will Mecca-directed music video for the record’s first single, “I Am Dog Now”.
Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile’s signature flavor of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band’s shift to a global thematic focus on Cool World not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their songwriting but also how they dissect the record’s core theme of violence. Melded into the band’s twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alternative and indie-esque hooks, and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the record’s ten tracks. “While we wanted our follow-up to God’s Country to still capture the immediate, uncompromising essence of Chat Pile, we also knew that with Cool World, we’d want to stretch the definition of our “sound” to reflect our tastes beyond just noise rock territory,” reflects bassist Stin. “Now that we had some form of creative comfort zones in place after hitting that milestone of putting out a full-length record, album #2 felt like the perfect opportunity to challenge those limits.” Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, Cool World is also the band’s first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg of Uniform capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge.
The proverbial thread tying all of the experimentation on Cool World together is the depth to which Chat Pile dissects the album’s theme of violence. Whether it be the cycle of creating and passively consuming literal and figurative violence on sister tracks “Camcorder” and “Tape”, the diminishment of crimes against humanity by way of foreign policy and colonialism on “Shame”, or the mental anguish of hopelessness on “The New World”, Cool World is an apocalyptically bleak record. Chat Pile’s debut record was plenty disturbing with its B-movie-inspired interpretation of a “real American horror story”, but what Chat Pile depicts on Cool World is as unsettling, not just from its visceral noise rock onslaught, but from depicting how all sorts of atrocities are pretty much standard parts of modern existence. In film terms, think something like a Criterion arthouse film by way of schlocky grindhouse splatterfest: undeniably gratuitous and thrilling in the moment but leaving a looming dread in the back of one’s mind for how close the horrors depicted mirror reality. “If I had to describe the album in one sentence,” explains Busch, “It’s hard not to borrow from Voltaire, so I won’t resist – Cool World is about the price at which we eat sugar in America.”
Cool World will be released on october 11th via The Flenser. Pre-orders are now available here.
