Unlike their namesake—an amorphous slag heap viewed from long stretches of desolate highways—Chat Pile is a band fully formed out of all their favourite things. Urban sprawl and decay, dread, cult horror movies, underappreciated nu-metal, noise rock, banal trivia, and local Oklahoma news stations covering every time a resident drives a car into a wall.
Now, Oklahoma is famous for a few things I barely know much about. A hamburger with fried onions, for one. A musical? That’s my ignorance talking. Strangely, Chat Pile’s championing of their surrounding nothingness makes me believe I understand everything about it. One look at those initial EP covers and you can feel all-American monoliths looking down on your insignificant self on the dusty ground, next to a megachurch and thinking of songs about humans being converted into Arby’s ground beef.
Pynchon-esque paranoia floods out of Raygun Busch’s short stories that deal with the homelessness crisis, botched store robberies and genocide, and takes influences from Beefheart to Voltaire to Velvet Underground to a failed Ralph Bakshi movie. There’s a film soundtrack in the mix too, and a joint twangle-doom effort with fellow panhandle guitar maestro Hayden Pedigo. Their lore, from the very beginning, has been tremendous and seemingly effortless.
Without any context this all sounds silly. With it, it still sounds outrageous that they manage to sculpt everything together into actual music. Good music. Great even, and only proven further throughout the band’s logical next step: a turn toward lush, jangly melody—a softening we see at this stage in many band’s lives—only here, it’s softness subverted into menace.
This brings us to third full-length Who Loves The Sun. In Raygun’s words, it is “classic alt rock”, with Luther Manhole’s downbeat guitars being “XTC-sounding.” Both excellent things before any Chat Pile treatment, and they can certainly be heard. They’re there on the twinkling note-runs of Shrine and the strut-worthy post-punk cut Intruder, where Raygun’s diversifying vocal range is complemented by Nightosphere’s Claire Hannah and Brittany Sawtelle in the singable refrain “someone told me this house needs haunting.”
Somehow, memorable hooks have always been in the band’s playbook (“I am dog now!” and “You don’t wanna hear what I have to say!”); hearing them in a more comprehensible style only shows their concerted efforts to switch things up being achieved. All the while we still get great Buschisms like “I never wanted to be in love / Awful thing, dreadful thing”, “Who can say? Who can when everything is so fucked up and tasty?” and “That’s what it feels like to lose your fuckin’ soul!”.
Amongst the growing dynamism, there’s no loss of swagger, ringing panic chords, Korn worship and metronomic power drilling. It’s those more caustic aspects that elevate the claustrophobia of both their locale and the world at large. As bassist Stin says, their appeal lies in the band’s filmic, realistic, or backhanded depictions of small town anxieties as much as the crumbling of wider society, understood by audiences everywhere. The feeling exists, just in a place that looks a little different.
This is portrayed in the way Influence packs in as much darkness as danciness, and how Deep Blue sees the everyday through supernatural pandemonium—“Landfill has crept into our home / Demons are dancing in the halls of empty domes.” Tantalising opener Creature—“Every city underwater / Every creature led to slaughter”—pictures our unimaginable reality becoming manifest. Things everyone can all see in plain sight, choose to ignore or gaze at in horror.
Everything sounds very serious. Yet true to form, the largely frightening music is conveyed through the group’s totally-themselves playfulness. They have barely sounded heavier on the hilariously titled PEN I S MALL, that’s in part about dicks and malls (annoying jobsworths and career subordination in a mall more specifically), and features a pre-breakdown bong rip. Christabel ‘26 lurches about like a panting greyhound and depicts some sort of vampiric bloodletting. October All The Time sounds similarly Halloweenish, and that’s perhaps the point, with its lamenting guitars painting fallen leaves and leaving us on a cliffhanger drenched in autumnal fog.
Where singular songs across their albums might have been ‘the bouncy one’, ‘the minimalist one’, ‘the one with mask in the title’, or ‘Grimace’, Who Loves The Sun seems to treat each composition more as a naturally-shifting gear, letting the riff ideas and exorcised yells breathe. There’s hints of technicolour poking through the grayscale, with all the foreboding and pit-drops that makes fans’ limbs ready to lose their individual minds in some sweaty hole somewhere, where Stin pings around smiling in ska-trousers like a Crash Bandicoot villain, Luther sways like a wind-up robot toy, Captain Ron finishes his drum gig to presumably go and play ice hockey, and Raygun wades through his Letterboxd account.
It’s another wonderful evolution from a band that never needed evolution in the first place. What an idiosyncratic lot, who seem all too happy to keep delivering glorious, ominous goods to the masses from a shed in the Oklahoma ‘burbs. As if we would want them to be doing anything else from anywhere else.
For fans of: Mamaleek, Pissed Jeans, Scratch Acid
‘Who Loves The Sun’ by Chat Pile is released on 4th September on The Flenser.
Words by Elliot Burr
