In the six years since they emerged, the uncs from Oklahoma have become the most important and acclaimed noise rock band of the 21st century. Chat Pile has done this, not by grafting banger choruses onto the rainbow meat of their lurching meltdowns (although they have), nor by being exactly as sonically aggrieved as the present moment requires (although they are), but by being something far weirder for a metal band whose subject is the debasement of American civilization: emotionally accessible.
…
…
Chat Pile are the band speaking most directly to our cultural moment, at least here in North America. And maybe it had to come from noise rock. Maybe, only in the absence of any expectation of resolved progressions or even feints in the direction of melody, the space was created—a shifting, sonic funhouse hallway of sorts—for a shirtless, barefooted guy to pace up and down and channel our collective grievance at the unjust, maliciously broken state of things. A generational frontman, Raygun’s Busch’s entire-ass embodiment of the manic, melted ranting we see in our feeds and on the streets and, worse, sense nesting latent within our own guts has come to feel like a kind of ritual performance, a dance enacted to purge this thing we’re all gripping and unable to release as we participate day after day in the operations of this cultural/industrial machine that’s eating the world and shitting out skeletons and dust. It’s not a trend, it’s not a trope, your mind is not playing tricks on you; things are this fucked. And somehow, music that sounds like heavy things collapsing alongside words about cops swollen with violence and how fast food is atrocity plus flavor and poor bastards losing their minds in apartments higher than the first floor, all bundled in artwork that puts eye to the post-industrial, ragged interstitials between the places we labour and the places we spend, makes us all feel a little more seen, right? In the 2020s, things are definitely blowing in the wind, but answers they ain’t.
The question around Chat Pile is, after those roadkill-raw EPs, after God’s Country’s wounded rage and Cool World’s blasted dissociate-n’-roll, how much longer will the same ritual do? We purge our anger and we purge our hurt, and the machine continues to grind and grind—can it actually be enough to pace and rave and bellow it all out?
When I first heard that their next project was going to be a collaboration with Texan fingerstyle dream-weaver Hayden Pedigo, I both couldn’t hear it in my mind and knew with dead certainty it was going to fuck me up Pedigo is a liminal figure in the instrumental folk world, a prairie-dwelling guitar imp with a yen for internet shenanigans and sidelines in modelling and local politics. His music has evolved over the years from early formal experiments into a more lyric, pastoral zone, but there’s always been an undertone of hauntology in his presentation, most overtly in the Jonathan Phillips-painted cover art of his recent Motor Trilogy of solo albums, all of which feature gleaming (or flaming) vehicles and unsettling avatars of Pedigo himself, square to the viewer like something freshly climbed from a well to haunt American road power itself. The images framing Pedigo’s magic hour finger-picking across said trio of records ask what must exist around the edges of any experience, like peace and contentment, in this particular American moment.
It’s this quality of Pedigo’s that allows him to function as the skeleton key of In the Earth Again, a frankly stunning record that unlocks Chat Pile as a project moving beyond embodying forms of ugliness as they crystallize out of the body politic towards one more interested in witnessing how that ugliness is shot with beauty, and even, grace.. In the Earth Again unfolds like a guided tour through the aftermath of a fallen world. Pedigo’s guitar—most often electric here, and bathed in a diluvian reverb cause, y’know, look around—lamps the way through the album’s codex of staticky, unsettled instrumentals and heartbroken eulogies for a doomed world like a psychopomp, the songs rising from the darkness ahead like settlements scattered across a haunted land. There are a handful of tracks which feel familiar in tone from both acts’ past forms—“Never Say Die” and “The Matador” are weapons-grade Chat Pile, while “I Got My Own Blunt To Smoke” finds Raygun carrying the sunlit atmosphere of the Motor Trilogy in a diving bell. But, in the context of In The Earth Again, the former pair stand in the silence like burning cities against an tar-black sky, while the cool bliss of the latter, coming in the immediate aftermath of the harrowed, chruning, seven-and-a-half minutes that is “The Matador,” feels avoidant, almost dissociative–or else transcendent, remindingof nature’s vast indifference.
…
…
Around those waypoints, interstitials live that belong fully to this collaboration’s alchemy. Opener “Outside” tracks a guitar figure that partially resolves, like an incomplete circle continuing to attempt itself while a warm darkness rises around it, overdubs sounding in and out like fireflies until an ominous, sandy rattle overtakes the scene. This approach, a static unfolding of an instrumental landscape, is echoed again on “Behold a Pale Horse” where Pedigo’s wary, agile guitar dances amidst what I imagine to be Luther Manhole’s hissing, distorted wash, which presses in and out like a dark tide, while “Fission/Fusion” is all molten, industrial compression that suddenly breaks into open interplay between the band while a sample of an urgent voice in a language I don’t recognize rises up into the space left behind by Ray’s absence.
But it’s the ballads here that bear In the Earth Again’s true purpose. Steadied by Pedigo’s sensitive playing and freed of performing varying degrees of rage and mania, Busch reveals himself capable of astonishing tenderness. “Demon Time” is a haunted warning-as-prayer, a fire burned all the way down to coals. Raygun’s reverb-dimmed vocal, playing off Pedigo’s firefly guitar and Stin’s perfectly spare bass, chiming in on the one like a doomed bell, sounds beamed in from a place outside time as he incants, “All the castles of the world will burn, and/Someday the demons will return/And they will find you/And they will fuck you up,” with all the dispassion of a broken heart turned to bone. The prettiest moment on the record, “The Magic of the World” lilts like Gordon Lightfoot on his rainiest day (rainy), or maybe Fred Neil with his “Everybody’s Talkin’” everted to “no one in the world talkin’ ever again.” The loveliness of Pedigo’s chiming guitar line is all memory as Ray sings about keeping the people he knew down in the earth with him until the world ends. He sounds defeated but resolute, bearing a candle past all hope out of nothing but old duty and honour to the memory of what he once loved.
It’s a heartbreaking sentiment, one that is revisited on the album’s closing track, “A Tear for Lucas”. A devastating elegy for a lost friend, “A Tear for Lucas” captures one of those transit moments in early life where tragedy snaps the string of childhood, and we stop being “young”, and begin, slowly, to live on as “no longer young.” The line “But we become/so convinced/that we possess/boundless chance/inherent grace,” is diamond-cut, but the delivery is impossibly tender—words to a young person, a younger self, the young part within the listener. In the back half of the song, Busch’s voice starts to halt and crack with emotion. “Not to say/I was around/Hurt too much/to watch you drown,” he chokes out, an admission from someone long past wanting, or taking, forgiveness. It ends on the lines “‘Cause I loved you then/And I love you now,” the soft magic of the song being that we already know.
“A Tear for Lucas” is a breakthrough for this band, as is this album, and the collaboration that unlocked it all. Chat Pile has always landed for me as fundamentally comforting in their bloodied way. To get metatextual, their presence in the metal world and the social media around it, between their Instagram AMAs on tour and Raygun’s baked and bathrobed monologues on movies, is invariably warm, inclusive, salt-of-the-earth, which polishes a bit of the gnar off their recorded vibe, or sets it off in just the right light. They have, from the beginning, felt like one of us, and as such, the transparency of their art as it processes in real time the horrors we sit and stare at every day, or else actively shut out as survival praxis, lands as an embrace rather than a confrontation. With In the Earth Again, that embrace has become an offer to sit and just hurt together, without hope, perhaps, but not without power.
In “The Magic of the World,” Ray invokes the album’s title in the open lines: “Down in the earth/Hall of despair/I am the keeper now/Until the world ends.” The lines, like the title, carry a chthonic resonance that pops up across the record, on “Never Say Die!” (“Down in the holes of the earth/There’s nothing but time”) and “Radioactive Dreams” (“So I’m sitting now/Half in the earth/With the ghosts of my friends/And the ghost of the world”). The literal earth itself, down under the soil, is evoked as a place where a kind of safety is maintained, more spiritual than physical, a place where love can be honoured, where time operates on principles far more vast, cool, and forgiving than on the blasted surface; a myth-space that bears the cycle of life and death. The title is In the Earth Again for a reason. This is a cycle, greater and older and more powerfully alive than all of our sufferings, injustices, tears, and holocausts. That fact, that we belong to it, and will return to it, and it will go on carrying us with it, may feel like cold comfort, or none at all, but it remains true, and it remains right here beneath us. It may not be exactly an answer to the question Chat Pile famously asked on God’s Country, but In the Earth Again is what the new Chat Pile has to offer us; a new, very old ritual.
–Josh Rioux
…
In the Earth Again is available now via Computer Students.
