Chat Pile - No Way Out

2024 has been filled with great albums by amazing artists (Micah Schnabel, Man’s Gin, The Jesus Lizard, Lonesome Shack, to name just a few), though the album I was most anticipating was the sophomore release from the Oklahoma noise rock band Chat Pile. I have written about them numerous times before on this blog, including just last month, clearly illustrating my excitement about the band’s work. They have a knack for portraying the horrors of the modern world in a way that does not feel exploitative, but in a way that actually feels unsettling. Much of their work has focused on the suffering of small town America, though their new record, Cool World, has turned their lens outward towards the suffering of the world. In the words of Chat Pile’s vocalist Raygun Busch, “it’s just a big anti-war statement, the whole album – every song is about how much I hate war. Man’s greatest shame.”  

Chat Pile - King

I have now written about Chat Pile, Oklahoma City’s noise rock upstarts, a few times. Their brand of extreme music borrows more from the noisy punk rock of Big Black than it does heavy metal. And much like Big Black, Chat Pile uses their music to examine the decrepitude of smalltown America, highlighting the suffering and the vulgarity that can often accompany life there. Shortly after the success of their first full length album, God’s Country, in 2022, Chat Pile released a split record with Kansas City’s Nerver, called Brothers in Christ. On the split, Chat Pile experimented with sounds indebted to alternative rock bands like Slint and Guide by Voices, while not losing their trademark gloom.

Song Highlight: Timeshares - Bad Hand

Earlier in the week, my brother Eric suggested that I revisit the music of Timeshares, a country-tinged punk rock band from downstate New York. I wrote about them a few years ago after seeing them open for the Menzingers, where I was thoroughly impressed to the point of thinking they outshone the headliners. After Eric's suggestion, I proceeded to listen to their 2018 EP Out There and have had it on repeat for the past several days.

Locrian at The Metro Gallery (19-Jul-2024)

See the black sun rise in the solar lodge. (FUJIFILM X-T4 ƒ/2.8 1/125 55mm ISO6400)

Since becoming interested in heavier and harsher music about 15 years ago, I have slowly gravitated towards its weirder and more unorthodox fringes. I credit the drone metal band Locrian as one of the bands that introduced me to the more experimental side of the metal landscape with their unique combination of brooding drones, beautiful post-rock guitar passages, electronics, and harsh noise. I came upon the band with their 2010 album The Crystal World, named after the J.G. Ballard novel of the same name in which a physician travels to Central Africa to treat leprosy, only to find the jungle there slowly turning to crystal, enveloping everything in its path. The album convinced me to read the novel, and I was amazed how well the album fit the tone of the novel, one of bleak desolation, but a strangely beautiful and hopeful desolation. I have been enthusiastically following the band since, watching them continue to explore the themes of urban decay and humanity’s slow march towards extinction. The band released a new album in April of 2024, End Terrain, and I was very excited to see they had a string of tour dates to accompany the release. I was fortunate to see them play at the Metro Gallery in Baltimore on July 19, 2024. My brother Eric and I were able to take a bunch of pictures of the event, and want to share some of them.

Mono - Holy Winter

Just a few days after writing about Steve Albini and his seminal punk band Big Black in April, he unexpectedly passed away from a heart attack. His music had a huge impact on me and my evolving musical tastes, showing me what sort of terrifying and aggressive sounds could be wrenched from the customary instrumentation of rock and roll. Beyond Albini’s influence on me personally, he had an immeasurable impact on independent music with his career as a recording engineer, recording the work of hundreds of notable musicians, including the Pixies, Nirvana, and PJ Harvey. He specialized in capturing the live sound of the band, with the recordings capturing the harmonics of the room they were recorded in, making it sound as if you were present with the band while listening to the recordings. And while Albini himself played loud and unpleasant music, he recorded music of all styles and sound, striving to make raw and genuine sounding recordings of whomever he worked with. And that brings me to the topic of today’s post, the song “Holy Winter” by the longstanding Japanese instrumental post-rock band, Mono. 

Cadabra Records - Story of the Eye

Only a few years into writing on this blog (May 2014), I had the idea of writing a post about the Eyehategod song "Story of the Eye". Eyehategod are a legendary band from New Orleans, Louisiana, who are noted as one of the early practitioners of sludge metal. The song "Story of the Eye"  is propelled by an awesome guitar riff and the vocal tirades of Mike IX Williams, all of which is completely indecipherable. Knowing that the song was named after a novel, I thought that I could read the novel and write something about it and the song. While I knew the novel had some level of notoriety, I was not fully prepared for it. Story of the Eye was written by the French philosopher Georges Bataille in 1928, and it follows the sexual exploits of two teenagers that become increasingly more debaucherous and depraved. After reading Story of the Eye, I was not sure what I even had to say about it, and being that the lyrics of the Eyehategod song were uninterpretable, I never wrote the blog post. Fast forward ten years, and I heard that Cadabra Records Cadabra Records was hosting a live reading/performance of Story of the Eye at the end of May in Philadelphia. I knew that I had to go, and maybe finally write something about Story of the Eye.

Big Black - Cables

One of my first meaningful introductions to heavy music was from Steve Albini’s seminal and short-lived punk rock band, Big Black. Big Black was able to obtain a level of musical extremity without the shrieked vocals or shredding guitar solos of heavy metal music. Instead, Albini achieved a level of ferocity with the monolithic pounding of a Roland TR-606 drum machine and clanging guitar which sounded less like traditional guitar and more like a buzzing sheen. To get this unique guitar sound, Albini would play with metal guitar picks adorned with small snips of sheet metal. Big Black used guitar as a way to create texture as opposed to using it as the melodic core of most rock bands. The vocal work is also not at the center of the songs, instead becoming another texture to mesh with the chaos of guitar noise and synthesized drumming. When I first heard Big Black, I had never heard anything quite like it, and I was completely enthralled.