Last Updated on July 21, 2022, 2:59 PM | Published: July 19, 2022
Dante Alighieri envisioned a sign above the gates of Hell proclaiming “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
That same sign could just as easily hang over OKC-based experimental metal outfit Chat Pile’s new full-length “God’s Country.”
Described even by the band’s own press as “American nihilism,” the sentiment here is pretty clearly one of hopelessness and existential terror, but just as clearly one of defiance and outright refusal to stop screaming into the void.
Chat Pile have always been a confoundingly difficult band to define or even describe, and “God’s Country” arguably only makes them more so. Though there is a prevailing attitude, an unstoppable momentum, and a fantastically consistent production value throughout, the songs each careen and crash into one another with styles, sounds, and influences all flying in every direction.
And that’s exactly what makes this album, and indeed the band themselves, so listenable. It would be so easy to become burnt out or numb to an unending barrage of metal, but the songs here each twist and turn toward finding their own ways to unnerve you and keep you from ever getting too comfortable with the discomfort.
The most encompassing descriptor here is surely “brutal.” This is about as dark and as heavy as music can get, but that isn’t always because of crushing, down-tuned guitars and gut-punching drumming. Those elements are absolutely here, make no mistake, and if you only bothered listening to the first two tracks (also the two pre-release singles for the album,) you’d likely believe that Chat Pile belong lumped into the sludge or noise-metal categories pretty easily.
But the thematic brutality on display here resides more in the subject matter and presentation than strictly in the music, which is vividly creative and almost stubbornly unexpected from track to track.
After the bone-shattering one-two punch of “Slaughterhouse” and “Why,” third track “Pamela” cuts a sharp left turn into something like goth-rock new wave territory, shockingly akin to early Bauhaus. Though the crushing metal power chords return for the song’s chorus, the textural, glassy verses go a long way toward highlighting the 80s goth influence on the band, and in fact on the entire modern metal genre.
From there on, all bets are off.
While the album continues its unrelenting excursion into the depths of humanity, the music itself does relent at times, opening up enough to let you breathe and get your bearings with a surprisingly catchy or hypnotic guitar riff before dragging you back under.
Singer Raygun Busch (the members all carry comically exaggerated monikers) sports a bi-polar, often theatrical vocal style, alternating in knee-jerk cycles between distraught, pleading yowls and completely detached, near-monotone. His voice is never more effective than on penultimate track “I Don’t Care If I Burn,” three minutes of Busch declaring and dissecting his own ill will atop a soundtrack of nothing more than crackling and scratching. One assumes it’s the sound of a fire growing.
Chat Pile are most often referred to, it seems, as “noise metal” or “noise rock,” but there is so much genuinely creative and impressive musicianship here that a designation like that seems to miss. There are no shredding, show-off guitar solos or vocal acrobatics, but there are loads of off-kilter time signatures or playfully dissonant guitar melodies that are clearly intentionally devised to keep the listener off-balance and holding on for dear life.
It’s noisy, yes, but it’s far from just being noise.
The subject matter at hand is made crystal clear by the album’s cover art: a stark, untreated shot of the infamous (and consistently deadly) Oklahoma County Detention Center partially obscured by power lines and a portable toilet. The symbolism is delivered with a sledgehammer.
With the recent approval of a multi-hundred-million dollar new jail facility for the county, it’s easy to suspect that in just a few short years, the building depicted on the cover will be a long-demolished memory, leaving the central theme of “God’s Country,” the inescapable pointlessness of suffering, all the more loud and clear.
This is monumentally heavy music for heavy music fans. If you’re not traditionally into the loud, blisteringly hard extremes of hard rock, then you’d do well to steer clear of this one.
But if, in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, a worldwide heatwave, and a worldwide economic collapse, you need to dive into the void and shatter your own comfort zone for awhile, then abandon all hope and enter “God’s Country.”
“God’s Country” by Chat Pile is out July 29th from The Flenser Records. Pre-order now at chatpile.bandcamp.com. Lead singles “Slaughterhouse” and “Why” are streaming everywhere now.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
