Chat Pile come from Oklahoma City, and it shows. The quartet owe their name to the mounds of mining waste that disfigure their region’s landscape — an image of desolation that irrigates all their music. God’s Country, a much-anticipated debut after a handful of noted EPs, condenses into nine tracks a merciless vision of the America of the left-behind. The critics (an 86 average across fourteen reviews) received it as a shock.
What strikes at once is the voice of Raygun Busch: a flood of hallucinated words, oscillating between lament, scream and the monologue of a madman. He tells of misery, homelessness, social violence, the spiritual dereliction of a country in ruins. The subject is frontal, never complacent, of a darkness verging on documentary realism.
Musically, Chat Pile cross abrasive noise rock with the stickiest sludge. The guitars spit deviant riffs, the bass saturates, the drums hammer an obsessive pulse. The deliberately filthy production conveys the impression of a band playing in a derelict hangar. It is ugly, oppressive, and terribly effective.
The record is not free of longueurs: some pieces stretch at the risk of diluting their impact, and the uniform darkness may tire the unprepared listener. But that monotony is also a strategy, a way of shutting the listener into the despair it describes.
Verdict: 8.5/10. A visceral, political debut, one of the most striking of the recent American underground scene. An unroped plunge into the margins of a sick country.
