#Experimental Sludge Metal

[guerrilla-operator]

MELVINS

[haveyouheardthisband]

[von-vom]

[happymetalgirl]

Chat Pile - God's Country

Chat Pile was the surprise breakout act for many fans of heavy, noisy, or otherwise extreme music last year, myself included. And for good reason, even though the preceding EPs the band released are sonically in line with it, God's Country hit like a totally different out-of-control pick-up truck through the living room wall of an Oklahoman house in the middle of the day (if you know you know; if you don't know, don't worry about it). The band members are from the desolate middle-American saucepan state, and the hidden horrors of the deep red rural hellscape of their home environment certainly seeps through on the sarcastically-titled God's Country, juxtaposed frighteningly with the album cover. Benign on first glance, the beige background features the image of a bunch of powerlines and energy infrastructure, with a massive detention center behind. Such a typical sight in the more remote parts of the U.S., but once the identity of the buildings of the image become clear, the album cover's statement on America's carceral system is impossible to miss.

It's hard in this day and age with modern metal production to really stand out from the crowd on heaviness alone, but like I said, Chat Pile hit with an unexpected and truly unique kind of noise/sludge metal heaviness. Aggressively rumbly distorted bass lines mixed as high as (if not higher than) the down-tuned guitars, booming and thundering drums, and swampy clean guitar tones are all well-arranged in chaotic and thrilling dynamic from front to back. But the real show-stealer on God's Country is vocalist Raygun Busch. The vocal prowess Busch displays across the album is not exactly the traditional sort (impeccable control of a variety of techniques across a wide vocal range). Rather, what makes Busch's performance compelling is how visceral and uncontrolled it comes across. It's still a talent that he's wielding and it only sounds uncontrolled, at least partly. The range his performance spans on the album goes from droning and unsettling spoken word, to dissociative and inebriated moaning, to the full-on manic breakdowns of full-throated wailing, shouting, and shrieking that really chill you to the bone.

The band do quite a fine job merging the theatrical horrors of B-movie cinema with the untold real-life horror stories of modern America: ("God's country"), using the excesses of the former to reel you in and press your face up to the latter. The first song on the album, "Slaughterhouse", explodes out of the gate with a concussing, industrial-grade barrage of bass-y distorted sludge that almost certainly leaves all heads ringing throughout the venue in a live setting. The lyrics leave a healthy amount of room for interpretation, but the most likely interpretation given the title is the detailing of the industrial-sized horrors of factory farming, specifically the trauma inflicted upon the workers: being watched by all the animals, trying not to look into their eyes, the head-ringing loudness throughout the labyrinthian and unescapable facility, and all the dreadful, traumatizing screaming. It's a fucking chilling track, deserving of it's pulverizing instrumentation.

The album's second track, "Why?", is arguably the standout cut on the album; unlike the first track there's really no room for interpretation. It's the most direct the band gets on any song on the album. Raygun Busch starts with an inquisitively perplexed delivery of the simple question, "why do people have live outside?", and escalates the same unanswered question to a crazed, furious, repetitive interrogation of America's inhumane treatment of the homeless. It's a simple, yet bloodcurdlingly convicting confrontation of the broader systems that brutalize the impoverished to protect the wealthy and the illusion of American utopia.

And the album does not let up from there, even on the more relatively subdued (less screaming) songs. The more instrumentally understated "Pamela" details in poetic brilliance the recurrent bargaining mechanism to cope with the torture of lingering grief and the suicidal (possibly also homicidal) resignation of a parent (probably a mother) losing a child to a drowning accident. "Wicked Puppet Dance" makes an effective use of lyrical brevity over dizzyingly pounding instrumentation to vividly portray the hallucinatory and psychosis-inducing trappings of meth addiction. The grim, unsettling subject matter and imagery of the songs and the deranged delivery of the lyrics evoke equal comparisons to heady experimentalists Xiu Xiu and to critical pariahs like self-titled-era Korn.

The always-topical "Anywhere" spotlights the endemic fear of the ever-looming possibility of being caught the fire of the American-signature brand of mass gun violence literally... anywhere, while the merciless "Tropical Beaches, Inc." focuses on the slower way America likes to kills you, through the ceaseless grind of enslavement to capitalism.

The odd name of the album's closing track, "grimace_smoking_weed.jpg", only serves to disarm you for possibly the most terrifying moment on the album. On the 9-minute closer Raygun Busch frantically and incoherently describes desperately trying to resist being compelled to commit suicide by a haunting/recurring hallucination of the furry purple McDonald's mascot under the effects of a bad heroin trip. The lyrics are so all over the place and so chaotic, the voice of the speaker shifts to and from Busch himself and the demonic hallucination of Grimace in his head. The closing track here is definitely Busch's most harrowing performance, and it's his vivid, soul-chilling panic that really gives this song the edge. The obvious parallel to Korn here is to Jonathan Davis' similarly disturbing and traumatizing performance at the end of the self-titled album on "Daddy". Whereas Davis opened up his old wounds in a very questionably unhealthy manner and channeled his trauma through his most tortured vocal performance to make a monumentally terrifying piece of art that highlights the lasting torment of trauma from childhood abuse, Raygun Busch unleashes his full vocal madness to give sight to the invisible haunting thralls of the looming specter of suicidal tendencies and the nightmarish trappings of drug addiction. Both incredible, petrifying, nightmarish, and eternally memorable performances that deserve the utmost respect.

God's Country is one of those albums where at the end of it you kind of just have to sit for a while and decompress from it. It's a very mentally/emotionally draining album, especially at its finale, but despite that, it's also a cathartically pounding and validating album. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance that all of us have to live with or at least perform, living in the United States (and the rest of the western world). God's country is the richest country in the world, the most advanced, and supposedly the most capable, the best place in the world to live, heaven on Earth. And yet, there's so much hell. So much fucked up shit, so much suffering, so much that doesn't seem right. And you know that sense that something's wrong is so widely pervasive because it's the feeling that propagandists for the powerful try to redirect toward scapegoats like immigrants, people of color, queer people, etc. Anyone but the wealthy whose insatiable and senseless greed is fed through our labor. The way Chat Pile cut straight through all the noise and confusion to get at the real issues that make horror such a latent everyday pollutant all across the country that we're all inoculated to is strangely affirming and energizing. It pushes your face up to glass to look at the grotesque inner workings of the mundane everyday things you pass by on the way to your job, take for granted as normal, and think nothing of. The suffering that drives the engines that churn out the illusion of American prosperity, and that lock the vast majority of us in subclinical misery. It shows you what really makes God's country such a living hell.

I love this fucking album; it is grueling to sit through, but it's rewarding and honestly not a hard listen at all. The impeccably heavy instrumentals sort of tap into that constantly heightened sense of urgency as though the band is communicating that, yes, they're seeing and feeling what you're seeing and feeling. And honestly, for such a critically-acclaimed album, it plays surprisingly down in the muck and the mud with the people. It's poetic, but it's not inaccessible or unnecessarily cryptic. It's brilliant, but it's not snobbish. Chat Pile meddle shamelessly with the emotional rawness of grunge and unrestrained heavy fervor and fury of nu metal, and it's just subtle enough that the reviewers who ordinarily turn their noses up to such low-brow shit probably didn't notice they had enjoyed a nu metal album until it was too late. That's right, Chat Pile are nu metal, process that on your own.

9/10, best debut of 2022 and one of the best albums of the year in any category.

[disease]

UNIFORM & THE BODY // PENANCE [EVERYTHING THAT DIES SOMEDAY COMES BACK, 2019]

[djinn-ghoul]

i was so lucky to catch the body back when they toured with world peace but look at this

im gonna lose my mind over not being able to make it to this tour are you fucking kidding me

[damien-devil-art]

I don't know what genre my music is, so I made this

[guerrilla-operator]

[haveyouheardthisband]

[thetoxicvault]

F.F.0.:

Nick Cave, Frank Zappa, early Monster Magnet, Bell Witch...

THE GREAT TYRANT

The Trouble With Being Born (2015)

Relapse

Denton / Texas / U.S.A. 🇺🇲

THE GREAT TYRANT

Still Birth / Candy Canes

There's A Man In The Room (2011)

PINKISH BLACK - Dial Tone

Concept Unification (2019)

@1000deleting @grungenoisestoneraddicted

[theparanoid]

Melvins - Tarantula Heart

(2024 album)

Youtube Playlist | Bandcamp

[Sludge Metal, Experimental Rock, Stoner Rock, Noise Rock]

[sagehaleyofficial]

What is UP, my dudes?! It’s Friday again, meaning it’s time for another NEW RELEASE ROUND-UP! Which of these new releases is your personal favorite? Let me know in the comments, and suggest your own new releases for the week if they’re not listed! 💿

#Dayseeker #TheGhostInside #HighOnFire #TheMelvins #SeeYouSpaceCowboy #SignsOfProgress