We all need some time for ourselves. To calm down. To have a lavender infused soy-latte, a cozy, warming oven fire burning down the wood collected by Canadian monks 200 years ago in the company of some First Nation children whom they taught the psalms and how to praise the word of God. … wait shit, what? No, we all need to listen to Chat Pile and their new record Cool World!
Forget the shitty idea of spending Fall and Winter evenings snuggled up together in an attempt at escapism, at shutting out the vengeful, hateful world beyond our cozy little windowsill! The Oklahoma City band once again puts their money where their mouths are and shows up why this world should realistically be assessed a shithole run by pervert, money-seeking, moral-lacking billionaires throwing and/or attending “Freak Outs” and not taking a look at anything beyond their 100-car-garage.
Cool World is a powerful statement and the songs surely hold their necks up compared to its Album of the Year-predecessor God’s Country. If anybody had feared the guys to go soft on their new record and to lose their bite, rest assured, that is not the case, not in the least. Even though the opener ”I Am Dog Now” might seem lullabying us into false security with its opening ambient sphere for something like 20 seconds, the ensuing Industrial Noise Rock attack shows the path forward. Only on first listen is ”Shame”, the second track, a somewhat less aggressive, because listen careful beyond the amazing vocal melody and focus on the near Death-Metal like growls in the background and on the lyrics dealing with the long-termin consequences of a Post-Colonial world in which the former oppressors have withdrawn from their enslaved colonies now only to keep connected to them in the form of a capitalism driven dependence – please mark here that it’s not an interdependent system, but one of a clear hierarchical structure!
The way the musicians have incorporated a few more Shoegaze moments into their structures might become clear when listening to ”Frownland” and it still gives me the creeps to find the parallels in sound between Stin’s bass style and Rage Against The Machine’s Tim Commerford – bouncy but not in the Fieldy sense, much more with some basic HipHop-allure. Fortunately Cap’n’Ron doesn’t try to emulate Brad Wilk, so no one can call them a clone for another politically driven US rock band. But one thing might be similar: Chat Pile could be as important for this period of time as RATM was originally – and therefore it doesn’t come as a surprise that they covered the L.A.-quartet’s track ”Bulls on Parade” before. The track contains one of the critical point that both bands surely share: ”Weapons, not food, not homes, not shoes / Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal”. And indeed that is something that Raygun also hinted at in our interview stating he doesn’t see a party which would not screw the people over. Chat Pile are here to point out the deficits and the accompanying misconceptions our society holds for many people. Seemingly the only thing it holds for them.
The soundscape on Cool World are still noisey, but there are more elements of a kind of dragging Industrial sound, which become pretty obvious at the end of ”Camcorder” with is slowly fading outro which is then followed by the rather eruptive ”Tape” (notice the combination of “camcorder” and “tape”?). The tracks focus on the creation of violent content (”If I could, I’d kill them all” and ”They made tapes”) and then the consumption of the latter (”It was the worst I ever saw” and ”Let’s watch it again”) – one of the horrible side effects of our virtual reality life form. There is always someone to watch something even more horrifying than the last thing.
Even though there is a shift from the national (“God’s Country”) to the global (“Cool World”) the urgency, the demand and the saltiness of the presentation of topics occurring on a supra-national scale has the same fervor, passion and even anger as the first record. Musically, this band is untouchable and should keep on rubbing salt into the wounds which many try to neglect, forget and simply deny. The somewhat more varied and more diverse soundscape of the new record is still rooted in noisey Punk of the early to mid-80s and as Raygun dropped several bands to compare them with one clearly comes to mind: Dead Kennedys. The similarities are obvious, not only on a vocal or topic level but also in the way that both bands are never background music. You can neither put on Frankenchrist nor Cool World and not be sucked in immediately, finding yourself screaming along loudly, pumping fists frantically, radicalizing yourself mentally. This is the band the world needs now, not soft-pop vanities like ”What the World Needs Now” but rather ”No Way Out”! And now please excuse me, I have some wounds to scratch open as I shall not forget.
