Who Loves the Sun, by Chat Pile
A broken bottle lying in patchy grass. A long-dormant factory surrounded by the cracked remains of an asphalt parking lot. The charred skeleton of a family sedan crumpled under other junkyard detritus. These things can be beautiful.
With noise-rock aggression, Chat Pile etches several such tableaux of global, social and personal decay across its third long-player, Who Loves the Sun. Inside the aggression, though, the Oklahoma City quartet expresses despair, resignation and tenderness.
At first, those feelings seem buried under the avalanche of brutality the band vibrates into being on the opening track, “Creature”: Cap’n Ron brings John Bonham thunder on the drums, Stin gets so low on bass that he’s burrowing, L. Manhole careens guitar chords though hangar-sized echoes, and Ray B. urgently stalks from declamations to yowls.
Behind the pseudonyms and beneath the amplification, Chat Pile reveals soiled subtleties, like the deliberately crude recording of a comedown beat atop which “Same Rules” builds from a murmur to a scream inside a mausoleum, or like the hiss that generates a foggy backdrop to the doom-grunge march of “Christabel ’26.”
Just as those subtleties emerge from under rubble, so too do unusual reference points emerge from more obvious forebears.
“Influence” headbangs like High on Fire, but for most of the song Ray B. deploys flat-affect phrasing that resembles what indie-rock band Silkworm did so well, and within the crushing choruses of “Intruder” he and Claire Hannah and Brittany Sawtelle (two-thirds of the Kansas City post-hardcore band Nightosphere) could be the heavy-metal children of The Association.
The final song, “October All the Time,” lets noise recede as an acoustic guitar strums along to Ray B.’s muttering. Despite a sudden, brief burst of volume from the entire band as if it is mustering a Nirvana or Failure chorus, Chat Pile closes Who Loves the Sun contemplating the descent and settling of debris. That debris, here, can also be beautiful.
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