Even as an instrumental trio, Chat Pile would absolutely kill. But Busch guides them to true greatness. He has it all: presence, personality, and the storytelling chops of a seasoned horror director. He begins with his ravishing voice, which could mimic the authoritative bark of a grudge-bearing cop or the wizened meow of a basement troll, causing not just discomfort but something akin to physical disgust. When he screams, which is often, it’s not just figuratively creepy, he sounds literally curdled, as if little clumps of matter break loose from the walls of his throat, gluing the vowels together as they fall. When he expresses vulnerability, he has a quivering, sputtering tone somewhere between Wildcat Goldthwait Y barney gumble on a three-day spree; it is the sound of a man unraveling from within.
While there are topical themes in their music, “Slaughterhouse” exposes the brutality of industrialized meat production, and “Why” is a desperate plea for sympathy for the homeless, Chat Pile is not so much a political band as it is dystopian impressionists. “More than anything, we’re trying to capture the anxiety and fear of seeing the world fall apart,” He says Stin. True to form, song after song, Busch displays the terrifying magnetism of a street rant on a sandwich board. His theme can be chilling: in “Anywhere,” a gunshot pierces through a quiet moment, leaving blood on the narrator’s face, brains on his shoes; in “Pamela”, a man seems to confess to having drowned his son to take revenge on his wife. boiling like one of henry rollinsAngriest Missives, “Tropical Beaches, Inc.” it could be a businessman’s explosion of self-loathing. But the exact contours of song narratives are rarely clear. Both enthralled and repelled by Busch’s antiheroes, our sympathies wander uneasily over the bumpy surface of music, trying and failing to find a solid moral footing.
What’s scarier is the path these songs travel as they move from run-of-the-mill social ills to a kind of free-associative chaos. “Wicked Puppet Dance” starts out as a cautionary tale about intravenous drugs, but by the second verse the paranoid narrator is dishing out murder and arson, while the inscrutable chorus simply recites a list of loaded monosyllables, insistent as nitzer reflux and dripping portentously: “God/Eyes/Taste/Lips/Red/Phos/Death/Cum”. Likewise, “The Mask” begins as a short story told from the perspective of an armed robber, but by the end, his howls are an inventory of “smashed faces…/And jammed fingers/And damn dust in my eyes for the rest of the story.” life”. my life”, an unintelligible litany for anyone who does not live in his own tortured mind. Even the closing “Grimace_Smoking_Weed.jpeg,” a nine-minute monster about a guy so high he hallucinates the mcdonalds mascot in her bedroom, she is not as cheerful as she seems; at heart, it’s a harrowing existential nightmare, like a stoner-metal update of Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized.” accumulation of toxic metals at the bottom of its Pepsi.
Composing songs from the villain’s perspective is nothing new: watch hardcore, watch country, watch narcocorridos. To Chat Pile’s credit, even his most disturbing songs never feel exploitative. As slippery as their songwriting may be, there’s no mistaking the band’s ethical compass. The central “Why” question (“Why do people have to live outside?”) is an unequivocal indictment of a system that consigns people to homelessness. The dirge refrain “Anywhere” (“It’s the sound of a fucking gun/It’s the sound of your world collapsing”) should be played at a rigorous volume outside NRA headquarters. Still, the question remains: Why would someone want listening to someone singing from the perspective of a child killer? Perhaps for the simplest of reasons: because they are there. Chat Pile doesn’t ask us to relate to these depraved characters, he shows them to us because they are symptoms of a deeper rot.
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