other titles...
See also...
- I Am Dog Now
- Shame
- Frownland
- Funny Man
- Camcorder
- Tape
- The New World
- Masc
- Milk of Human Kindness
- No Way Out
Chat Pile
Cool World
Flenser
A fierce and belligerent second outing from the Oklahoma City quartet.
‘God’s Own Country’ set both the tone and a very high watermark but this goes some way to exceeding both in terms of quality and sheer heaviness. The Pile are wallowing in dark, raging waters, taking a pugnacious nihilism to their rotting nation. Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, the music of Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has stuck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift—a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems. Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile’s signature flavor of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band’s shift to a global thematic focus on 'Cool World' not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their songwriting but also how they dissect the album’s core theme of violence.
Melded into the band’s twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the album’s ten tracks. Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, 'Cool World' is also the band’s first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg (Uniform) capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge.
Our Will says: "The Oklahoma noise rockers have once again outdone themselves on ‘Cool World’. The gnarly bass grooves on tracks like ‘I Am Dog Now’ show us their trademark visceral heaviness is still very much intact. But also, on tracks like ‘Camcorder’, we see a new, more melodic side of the band shine through, which all fuses together to make ‘Cool World’ their most well rounded and mature project to date. Scarily good stuff."