With their second studio album, Cool World, Chat Pile continue to channel despair and dejection through grimy guitar riffs and brutally honest lyrics, recounting the subjugation of the lower classes by the well-fixed. Throughout, the Oklahoma City fourpiece warns of a population that allows itself to be exploited. On opener “I Am Dog Now,” singer Raygun Busch reminds us that “everyone bleeds,” a sentiment that’s echoed later on “Masc,” on which he begs, “Don’t tell your friends I trust and bleed.”
Musically and lyrically, Chat Pile aggressively argues for a fairer distribution of power, to tear down the systems that perpetuate cycles of victimization. These messages can feel a bit broad, as the band eschews specificity in favor of brute force, with screeds that are driven home by Busch’s gravelly vocals and Luther Manhole’s prodding guitar.
Chat Pile’s narratives resonate most when they’re more fully developed. “Tape,” which begins with a series of one- or two-word lines, delivers a gut-punch, as the song’s narrator glimpses a terrible atrocity that he feels obligated to respond to: “Someone had to say something or it would havе gone on forever/So I can’t wish I didn’t stop it, I can’t wish that.” The way the song builds to a repeated declaration of “They made tapes!” feels harrowingly cathartic.
While Chat Pile’s brand of metal is largely stripped of ironic affectation, there’s still some residual pageantry here. The band members all play characters with pseudonyms, and Busch tries on growly caricature of a deep baritone on tracks like “Shame,” which is distracting considering how many other expressive ways he uses to contort his voice—shrieks, bellows, numbed-out spoken word—throughout the album.
In a couple of instances, Chat Pile dabbles in ’90s, Pacific Northwest-style alt-rock (“Milk of Human Kindness”) and Detroit post-punk (“The New World”). And the band’s sludge-metal tendencies mean that songs often unfold at a deliberate crawl, with discernible silence between one note and the next. The music is loud but measured, and the guitars on tracks like “Frownland” have the dirty, rumbling tonality of a lawnmower.
By and large, though, Cool World is fierce, direct, and free of the kayfabe that plagues many metal acts. The album leaves the ears ringing and paints a hopeless, disquieting vision of modern America, not realized with nihilism but with intense and understandable pain.
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