Cool World by Chat Pile: A Perfect October Album

I had been excited about the release of Oklahoma noise-rock quartet Chat Pile’s sophomore EP since speaking to frontman Raygun Busch after a free show at Rubber Gloves back in April. My friend Richard and I talked with him about Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Captain Beefheart, and he revealed to us the album release date months before it was publicly announced. Now, Cool World is out, just in time for the month of October.

The singles had given us a taste of the record’s range: from the intimate and catchy “Masc” to the unhinged, threatening aura of “I Am Dog Now.” My personal favorite of these teaser tracks was “Funny Man,” a track which deals with the maltreatment of combat veterans along with the hideous vapidity of said combat.

The album’s Bandcamp page has Raygun describe the album as “[covering] similar themes to our last album, except now exploded from a micro to macro scale, with thoughts specifically about disasters abroad, at home, and how they affect one another.” The songs “Shame” and “The New World” speak to this mission statement the loudest. “Shame” evokes the impacts of imperial and colonial violence with the lines “In their parents arms / The kids were falling apart / Broken tiny bodies / Holding tiny still hearts”, while “The New World” places similar imagery over some of the album’s catchiest guitar riffs. 

The tracks “Camcorder” and “Tape” play out two sides of the same story—a story about snuff films and the banality of violence in the information age. I would also put “Camcorder” in a category with “Milk of Human Kindness”, as they both feature slow, haunting choruses. The lines “Let’s watch it again” and “I’d heard / nothing about the way they burn” are standout moments for me on “Camcorder” and “Milk of Human Kindness” respectively. 

“Frownland”—whose title unintentionally matches the opening track of the seminal 1969 disaster rock record Trout Mask Replica—is a tribute to the slowburn, atmosphere driven 2001 Japanese horror film Pulse. For me, this song will forever be associated with my conversation with Raygun and with a particularly rewarding moment during that April show where I took to the pit to release the energy the song had inspired in me upon my first listen. 

The closing track, “No Way Out,” is thematically and sonically akin to “The New World”; whereas that track was meant to inspire terror, this one gives way to the rage that follows. The brutality of the instrumentation is also ramped up on “No Way Out” for an evil conclusion to a horrifying noise rock album. This Halloween will be haunted not only by skeletons and zombies, but by the vengeful specter of the victims of US imperialism.