In Ralph Bakshi's Cool World, a femme fatale in a supposedly "created" cartoon world uses her wits and her sexuality to try and overcome her animated existence and enter the real. Why she would ever want to do that is baffling, since our "real world," the one she longs for, is very much like the violent, decaying one found in Chat Pile's titanic sophomore album, the aptly titled Cool World.
Formed in 2019, the band — named after the rocky toxic waste rejected during lead-zinc mining — has become highly lauded for their brutal mix of noise, punk and sludge, as well as their confrontational but often humorous and reference-laden live shows.
Although the four-piece, all of whom go by pseudonyms (Raygun Busch on vocals; Luther Manhole on guitar; Stin on bass and Cap'n Ron on drums), has a decidedly minimalist setup, on Cool World, the band's experimental tendencies have transmogrified into an ugly, eclectic and anthemic beast. While it's still very abrasive, challenging and hostile, the band has taken various genres and approaches — goth, alternative, indie, metal, industrial — and melded these disparate elements into their contemporary brand of noise rock, something equally harsh and, dare it be said, groovy (but not fun groovy…when you listen to it, you'll understand). While Chat Pile always had a thump and a bounce, on Cool World, those sounds are more apparent and present.
Album opener "I Am Dog Now" starts off with ethereal ambient noise, which quickly morphs into a filthy, slithery riff and Busch's statuesque scream. "I am dog now!" he bellows, conjuring up a much different canine image than Iggy's. The apathy and disenchanting of Today™ is echoed early in the album, as Busch depicts himself as an animal with "No cage, [yet] nowhere to go at all." It's a harrowing image, confused, lost and unfulfilled, but one that paints an accurate portrait of the image-and-likes-obsessed world the song is antagonizing.
With Cool World, the band's focus has shifted and expanded, exploding from "a micro to macro scale, with thoughts specifically about disasters abroad, at home, and how they affect one another." There is violence and warped foreign policy, colonialism and mental anguish, indifference, death, existentialism, apocalypse. It is bleak and grotesque, much like the world Chat Pile has observed in the two years since the release of God's Country. Many songs have plodding, death-march tempos that drag into oblivion. It's a harrowing listen, uncomfortable, desolate and disturbing.
In "Shame," boomer ambivalence shines raw and hostile, with the inherited wars and traumas of the previous generation maintained by a ruling class that would rather see profits and bodies pile up. "And the world was quaking open / With all our fathers smiling," Busch croons, the melancholy dripping from every syllable. Thanks a lot, "dads." It's a slow, despondent track, with a decidedly grunge-y underbelly — until Busch's death metal growl rears its foul, blistered head, that is.
"Funny Man" takes a similar thematic standpoint, with Busch casually, almost matter-of-factly, claiming that "the blood of my sons is just a new beginning." Rinse and repeat. It features a pounding nü-metal groove, but it's much more nihilistic than any of the sterile, puerile rap-metal you may associate with the genre. No one's getting nookie here. At one point, he howls, "Outside there's no mercy / And not everyone can hide / Not evеryone gets to hide." Welcome to the free world.
The playing throughout is heavier than heaven (or is that hell?), the bottom stretching through to the Earth's molten core. Manhole, Stin and Cap'n Ron fall into instrumental trances, pulling their instruments into monstrous shapes and eerily beautiful passages that nonetheless relish in unease. "Camcorder" is off-kilter and dissonant, stretching its cold, grinding outro past its own tense breaking point, while "Tape" is replete with gothy riffs and tones that hold Busch's terse bellows in clawed, black-laced hands.
Cool World isn't an accusatory album; it doesn't use its politics to point fingers because it doesn't have time for that. This world doesn't have time for that. Instead, it uses its poetry and its varied sounds for maximum effect; sometimes surreal, sometimes brusque, but always furious and blunt.
While it's missing some of the frantic, desperate immediacy of God's Country, Cool World sees Chat Pile exploring their sound and aggressively antagonizing the world around them. On "The New World," the album's harrowing centerpiece, the band crashes and distorts while Busch prepares to burn the status quo to the ground. The song also presents the album's central thesis: "Every moment that the bird sings sweetly / Can't be captured by the tip of the ballpoint pen / I couldn't take on the weight of existence / I couldn't watch them execute my friends." Beauty is hard to describe because it's hard to come by. Oftentimes, it's intangible, impossible, inaccessible. Brutality, violence and death on the other hand? Just look around, they're fucking everywhere. And so Chat Pile presents them in all their devastating glory: on album closer, "No Way Out," the minimalist lyrics lead to a climax where Busch repeatedly screams "No escape / No way out." We're stuck here. This is the world we've made. Open your eyes, and don't look away.