Chat Pile – Cool World

The music of Oklahoma City noise-rock quartet Chat Pile, like the giant piles of toxic waste from which it takes its name, is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential angst that defines the 21st century. It's understandable that a band with such a raw, unrelenting and offbeat sound has found so much resonance. The American dream has been replaced by horror, and Chat Pile's music is a poignant reminder of this shift - a portrait of an American rock band shaped by a society defined by its cold and cruel systems of power.

Cool World is not only the name of a largely forgotten (and frowned upon) 90s movie, but also an apt title for Chat Pile's second full-length album. In the context of a Chat Pile album, the words are imbued with a dark ambiguity that not only conjures up images of a dying planet, but also represents an evolution of the band's previous work, expanding the scope of their depiction of modern malaise from "God's country" to all of humanity. 'Cool World' deals with similar themes to our last album, only now we're moving from the micro to the macro, with thoughts on disasters abroad and at home and how they affect each other," says vocalist Raygun Busch.

Although Chat Pilei retain their signature cacophonous, sludgy noise-rock, the band's shift to a global thematic focus on Cool World fits not only with the broader experimentation they employ in their songwriting, but also with the way they dissect the album's core theme of violence. Traces of other eclectic genre stylings are infused into the band's twisted foundational sound, with examples ranging from languid, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and weird metal grooves that only scratch the surface of what's to be heard on the album's ten tracks. "While we wanted our follow-up to God's Country to still capture the immediate, uncompromising essence of Chat Pile, we also knew that with Cool World we wanted to expand the definition of our "sound" to reflect our tastes beyond noise rock territory," says bassist Stin. "Now that we had reached a sort of creative comfort zone, having reached the milestone of a full album, album #2 felt like the perfect opportunity to challenge those boundaries." Cool World not only pushes the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound stylistically, but is also the band's first album to have someone else handle the mixing. Ben Greenberg of Uniform (Algiers, Drab Majesty, Metz) has captured and amplified the quartet's unmistakable outsider and folk-art influence.

The proverbial common thread that holds all the experimentation on Cool World together is the depth with which Chat Pile dissects the theme of violence on the album. Whether it's the cycle of the creation and passive consumption of literal and figurative violence in sister tracks "Camcorder" and "Tape", the trivialization of crimes against humanity through foreign policy and colonialism in "Shame" or the mental anguish of hopelessness in "The New World", Cool World is an apocalyptically bleak record. Sure, Chat Pile's debut album was pretty disturbing with its B-movie inspired take on a "real American horror story"; what Chat Pile depict on "Cool World" is unsettling not only for its visceral noise-rock assault, but also for its depiction that all manner of cruelty is pretty much a standard part of modern existence. In cinematic terms, you can think of it like a Criterion arthouse film: undeniably gratuitous and thrilling in the moment, but leaving a sense of dread in the back of your mind because the horrors depicted are so close to reality.

"If I had to describe the album in one sentence," Busch explains, "it's hard not to quote from Voltaire, so I won't resist - Cool World is about the price at which we eat sugar in America."