Cheery bunch, Chat Pile. They make me want to kill myself. And there’s a reason for that—the Oklahoma City noise rock quartet’s basic theme is the depraved and homicidal things we do to one another, and they really rub our noses in it.
I don’t know what to make of the fact that both of their full-length releases have received nearly universal critical acclaim. Slow-down-to-look-at-the-multiple-fatality-car-crash syndrome, perhaps. But it doesn’t hurt that their loud and clamorous music is good for the ears of people who love music that is hard on the ears. This is anti-shiny happy people music, and they play it with pigfuck ferocity.
I’m a fan—if, like me, you pledge allegiance to the likes of Killdozer, Cows, Pissed Jeans, Big Black, and the Jesus Lizard, you don’t really have much of a choice, and they had me the first time I saw the video for “I Am Dog Now” from their latest, 2024’s Cool World. But I have a huge reservation about Chat Pile—unlike Killdozer in particular, they’re not funny. They don’t leaven the horror with black humor, and the results are bleaker than an Oklahoma winter.
Killdozer went in for the Wisconsin Gothic, but compare a song like Killdozer’s hilariously horrifying “Hamburger Martyr” with Chat Pile’s chilling “The Mask” and you’ll know what I’m talking about—Killdozer’s Michael Gerald is not a callous or uncaring person, but he had the good sense to inject his tales of human cruelty and depravity with mordant wit and the irony of Flannery O’Connor.
On their debut full length, 2022’s God’s Country, Chat Pile explored real-life atrocities, tales of fictional serial killers, the ravages of drug addiction and the like, and the results are ultimately numbing. The world’s a horrible place—nobody has to convince me of that—but theirs is a full-body immersion into the darkest recesses of the human psyche, with vocalist Raygun Busch speaking, singing, and frequently screaming like a ventriloquist through the psychotics who rampage through their songs.
It can be too much, unless you live on a steady diet of true crime and are even more of a misanthrope than I am, which is hard to imagine. I hate to keep going back to Killdozer, but Gerald had the wisdom to to leaven the dark stuff with lighter material—homages to the disaster films of Irwin Allen and cheapo car-painting king Earl Scheib here, a song about a cop who catches you red-handed with pot but doesn’t bust you because he gets high too there. Does that make him a healthier-minded individual? I don’t know. But I don’t turn on a Killdozer record with fear and trepidation the way I do God’s Country and Cool World.
That said, Gerald steered clear of the real-life horror shows Chat Pile addresses in songs like “Slaughterhouse” and “The Mask.” Mordant wit simply won’t cut it—an atrocity is an atrocity, and Gerald isn’t the sort to make light of real-life atrocities. Like the guys in Chat Pile, he cares; unlike Chat Pile, he simply chose not to go there—he’s too much of a comedian.
Chat Pile cares too—they make it clear in their howl against homelessness, “Why.” But here’s the difference between the two bands, and it’s telling. “Why” is a howling protest—Busch spends the song screaming why should people be forced to live in the streets, over and over. The answer is obvious, and Busch comes across as hopelessly idealistic and naive. His heart’s in the right place, but so is Gerald’s, and Gerald dealt with the same issue in songs like “Slackjaw” by telling stories that explain WHY people end up homeless, and while his stories may be horrifying they’re far more detailed, specific and, yes, affecting.
But what are you going to do? I can hardly write off Chat Pile because they’re not funny, or because their stories lack the compassion of those by Gerald at his best. If you want to address the awfulness of the world head on, so be it—just avoid the naivete of songs like “Why,” and “Why” is a standalone, so far as I know, in the Chat Pile catalogue.
Call it pigfuck or noise rock or industrial metal—Chat Pile has a more industrial feel than any of my faves, with the exception of Big Black, thanks in large part to the samples used by drummer Cap’n Ron. Chat Pile makes a big, ugly sound and things only quiet down (relatively speaking) on two songs, one of them being “Pamela,” about Jason’s murderous mom in the Friday the 13th films.
Gerald would have turned it into a laughfest, as his film criticism in “Man Vs. Nature” proves. Busch goes full creepy on it, and while it works, I read lines like “Cutting the meat/Forest of meat/Spill their blood/Spilling their blood/And resurrect my son/Resurrect my son/Resurrect my son/Resurrect my son” and find myself wondering whether Busch is actually taking the camp of the Friday the 13th films seriously. And I’m not talking about Camp Crystal Lake.
Chat Pile also keeps “I Don’t Care if I Burn” on the down low—it’s a low-key talk through, just Busch accompanied by a simple drum thump and some crackling (as in fire, get it?) percussion. Other than a single scream Busch sounds calm enough, but the words he’s speaking make it pretty clear he has revenge and murder on his mind. Doesn’t do much for me—murder ballads bore me, and when it comes to homicide I’ll take Killdozer’s “Hamburger Martyr” any day. It’s a laugh riot.
“Slaugherhouse”? Great music, hair-raising subject matter. Busch recounts, from the point of view of the killer, a horrifying beheading that occurred in 2014 at an Oklahoma food processing plant. “Hammers and grease” screams Busch over and over again, while filling in the blanks with lines like “Everyone’s head rings here/Everyone’s head rings here/And there is no escape/There’s no motherfucking exit” and “More screaming than you’d think/There’s more screaming than you’d think.”
Scary shit, but not as scary as “The Mask,” another Chat Pile Channel true crime episode based on a 1974 massacre of six innocents at an Oklahoma Sirloin Stockade restaurant. The music is pile-driver heavy, and Busch, who screams “Line up the animals!” over and over when he isn’t intoning lines like “It’s all broken faces in this nightmare world/And jamming fingers/And goddamn dust in my eyes for the rest of my life” in a menacing homicidal voice, will give you the shivers.
“Wicked Puppet Dance,” a real sweetie of a song about the ravages of drug addiction, proceeds at a clamorous gallop, and includes such cheerful lines as “Tried to fuck me, called me a liar/So I shot him in the head, set the house on fire” and “His skin is all fucked up but he cooked a nice batch/Everywhere in the walls new roach babies hatch.” “Tropical Beaches, Inc.” has a syncopated, sheet-metal beat and is, I think, about a serial killer, I think, who has a wife and kid and is fighting a compulsion he cannot beat, his mind a maelstrom of bloody murder and money. It’s very American Psycho, what with lines like:
“Deeper cuts
Bloody sheets
Making money
Making money
Deeper cuts
Bloody sheets
Making money.”
“Anywhere” is slicker and less clamorous than anything else on the album, its mayhem controlled and melodic, and Busch sings from the point of view of someone whose lover has just been killed in a random shooting. “At first your hand was in mine,” he sings, then there’s brain on his shoes and “It’s the sound of a fucking gun/It’s the sound of your world collapsing/It’s the sound of a fucking gun/It’s the sound of your world collapsing” and if he could just turn back time and had never come here things would be different but that’s how our life is now—you make an innocent choice and some maniac with a gun puts a bullet in your world.
“grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg” is nine minutes of psychotic weirdness, a staggering, stop-start, clamorfest in which Busch is visited in his room by a purple man and finds it rather… upsetting. As would anyone. I’ve smoked a lot of pot and never been visited by a purple man, but maybe the pot in Oklahoma is stronger than the pot on the East Coast. The Butthole Surfers would may hay with something like this—the remarkable thing is Busch isn’t playing it for comedy. And the even more remarkable thing is it works anyway.
I like the part where he’s trying to figure out if he throws himself out the window and lands on his face (he’s very specific about the face) he’ll die and the purple man will go away. He spends a lot of time screaming (over some killer monster chords) about how he’s a monster and purple man too, that is when he isn’t bellowing “I don’t want to be alive anymore/Do you?/Do you?/Do you?” Not when I listen to this one I don’t.
Well it depends when you ask me, but two things are clear—this is one humdinger of a song and Busch should probably lay off the reefer. Stick to beer. Maybe take a handful of valium or a thorazine. I’ve had some real pot-induced anxiety attacks, but jumping out the window face first anxiety attacks accompanied by purple men? Never. And I can’t help but think that while the music is traumatizing, Busch really should see a psychiatrist. And I can’t help but think a song like this should be funny, because taking it seriously is difficult indeed.
Chat Pile make ugly music, sing about ugly things, obviously think the world is an ugly place and people are awful, and I get it. Every day human beings do unspeakable things to other human beings and if this doesn’t depress you you’re either jaded or the Buddha. Chat Pile obviously care—they make that crystal clear on “Why.” And that’s to their credit. But a steady diet of unadulterated horror is too much for most people—me, for instance—and I simply find it impossible to “enjoy” albums like God’s Country for the simple reason that enjoyment isn’t on the menu, unless you get off on songs about serial killers and the like. I don’t.
I admire Chat Pile’s music, just as I admire their refusal to sugarcoat the unspeakable. But I think I’ll stick with Killdozer—if I don’t laugh I cry, and I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
