Life on Earth is bleak.You may be lucky enough to be shielded from it, for now, but incredible suffering is all around you, and it’s coming for you someday too.
You will die.Everyone you love will die.
If you’re lucky, your own demise will happen quickly, but more likely your personal wellbeing will take an extreme downturn before then, until you barely recognize yourself anymore.Some of your most treasured relationships will decay into alienation and loathing.
Addiction, homelessness, and abuse are lurking around every corner.Your body will fail you in increasingly gruesome and painful ways.
The planet will continue to lash out at its stewards in apocalyptic fashion, upending what you thought was a safe and secure existence.The devastating warfare that could only happen there, not here, will someday swallow up your little patch of paradise.
Rather than working to prevent these outcomes, many in power will reinforce systems that guarantee them.Numbness and despair will reign.
The more you understand all that, the more you understand Chat Pile.The Oklahoma City band’s music stares unflinchingly at life’s darkest realities, reflecting them back in music that is heavy in every sense.
God’s Country, Chat Pile’s 2022 full-length debut, made them fast-rising stars among listeners with a taste for the gnarled and grotesque.The band’s low-end churn was ugly and radioactive, yet such barbarous music moved with surprising fleetness and unexpected flashes of melody, like some kind of surreal nightmare creature.
Vocalist Raygun Busch spun his neuroses into freaked-out rants and muttered asides.Sometimes he descended into frantic hallucinations about, say, Grimace from McDonald’s.
Other times, he could not have been more clear-eyed, as when he repeatedly screamed, “Why do people have to live outside!?” It was powerful music about impotence and futility — the Jesus Lizard fronted by the human embodiment of Nihilist Arby’s.Cool World, the f...