The transition from Chat Pile‘s God’s Country to Cool World is partly, as the album titles suggest, a matter of scope. While the Oklahoma City band’s 2022 debut God’s Country tore into the cruel horrors specific (but not unique) to American territory, its follow-up finds them widening their gaze, “with thoughts,” according to vocalist Raygun Busch, “specifically about disasters abroad, at home, and how they affect one another.” If only they were just thoughts. The profusion of violence, death, and suffering – at times unspecified and often unimaginable, the stuff of nightmares, but always harrowingly, inescapably real – is not merely a thematic concern. It feels elemental. Busch makes no attempt at an argument, and his bandmates offer no catharsis in its absence. To deliver anything but a hopeless and uncompromising vision of reality would be to ignore everything that’s in front of us; it would mean to conform, and Chat Pile have no interest in that. They swallow it all in, and it bleeds right through the core of their gruelling music.
So even though Cool World looks beyond the ugliness of “home,” it still turns, or rather pulls, inward, internalizing anguish wherever it’s found. Busch is a dynamically empathetic performer who switches perspectives from one song to the next, only to remind us, as he does on the opening track, ‘I Am Dog’, that “everyone bleeds.” There he embodies the ultimate subject of dehumanizing apathy, lurching and pleading to no avail. But on the following track, ‘Shame’, the narrator awakens from a state of detached ignorance to the scorching truth, which cuts down to the bone: “It stung hot in my eyes/ The illusion of justice/ It burned deep in my face.” When “the skull speaks and its words are truthful,” what is there for the brain to reason? Busch describes images of war like it’s the first time his characters are, not necessarily seeing, but deeply registering them: “In their parents arms/ The kids were falling apart/ Broken tiny bodies/ Holding tiny still hearts.” (Another reminder: “All tears flow from the same source.”)
Cool World isn’t about bearing witness to the tragedies of the world so much as it just does, and those who have their eyes forced open can’t do anything to blank them out. Like ‘grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg’, God’s Country’s closer, ‘Tape’ dramatizes the tormenting process but leaves the story open to interpretation: “I guess someone had to see/ Someone had to be horrified by what they had done/ Someone had to say something or it would have gone on forever.” We only know it was the worst, and it was recorded, and in that way, it does have no end. From ‘Shame’ to ‘Funny Man’, it’s not hard to identify the atrocities documented on the album not just as not just systemically facilitated, but intergenerational: “Caged life/ Caged hurt/ Passed down/ Past earth,” Busch howls on ‘Funny Man’. And with the powerful pairing of ‘Camcorder’ and ‘Tape’ in the middle of the record (or the end of the first half feeding into the second), there’s a sense of lyrical continuity that elevates the album from its predecessor. Only ‘Masc’, which is more interpersonal and vulnerable in its anguish, feels a little disconnected.
But any sense of progress within Cool World, like that purported by mankind, exists only to highlight the cyclical nature of trauma. “Nowhere to go,” Busch despairs on ‘I Am Dog Now’, a sentiment that’s cemented by the final track: ‘No Way Out’. Chat Pile have no intention to complicate their message on their second album; in fact, they make it sound more direct. No subgenre of metal has ever felt apt for the band, but now “noise rock” barely applies, too; their musical approach is, fittingly, more elemental, foregoing the noisy, proggy sprawl that marked God’s Country. That makes it more pointed but no less eclectic: post-punky disaffection contrasting death-metal growls on ‘Shame’, the punishing (dare I say nu metal?) grooviness of ‘Frownland’, the dissonance unfurling to make way for wordless terror on ‘Camcorder’. Chat Pile can get as heavy and cacophonous as they like, but all the fury and pain exploding into view is nothing compared to the hollowness that follows. Busch’s delivery is at its most numbing when he repeatedly intones, “I can feel it”; when he admits to screaming all night, it is with total and haunting resignation. Maybe kicking and screaming does nothing. But once you stop looking away – if you have the privilege of hiding, that is – silence is no longer an option.