by Will Floyd (@Wilf_Lloyd)
Chat Pile’s particular breed of foreboding noise rock was always ripe for a movie score. If they were around in 2007 a majority of their catalog could probably have subbed in for Bonehead’s “Naked City” in Funny Games, and offered the same level of unease. If that doesn’t convey the general vibe of the Tenkiller soundtrack, you might try imagining what a Chat Pile soundtrack could plausibly sound like, and you would probably be very close.
That’s not to say the score is at all conventional—maybe just that it’s no surprise the band sounds perfectly at ease in a movie-scoring role, since the world of Chat Pile and film are inextricable. Stage banter at their concerts consists almost entirely of singer Raygun Busch naming movies that have been filmed in the city they’re playing. The music itself is cinematic in a way that few bands can achieve, with Busch’s narrative lyrics thrusting you into the center of the action, and into the locus of his tortured protagonists, whose anguish he tends to express less like Corey Taylor and more like a raging Daniel Day Lewis monologue.
The most obvious stylistic outlier on Chat Pile’s 2022 debut, God’s Country, is the brief and unsettling “I Don’t Care If I Burn,” a noise track where the only instrumentals are what sounds like scraping feet and snapping twigs recorded at ASMR decibels. It was a sharp contrast against the unrelenting noise rock that spanned the rest of the album, and it fit in the tracklist because like every other song on God’s Country, it is scary. Still, the starkly different instrumental palette hinted towards latent experimental proclivities. The score to Tenkiller, for the most part, is a deeper probe into those instincts.
The production here is more echoic of the band’s first two EPs, which were a tad more homespun. The guitars are a little fuzzier, and the percussion in particular relies heavily on ambient noises like scraping, tapping, and sometimes electric drilling, a la Hostel.
There is ample noise rock filler here too, and if God’s Country has already soundtracked your life in the second half of 2022, like it seemingly has for so many, you might as well throw a song like “Tenkiller” in the rotation, because it is by no means mid.
Perhaps what is most exciting about this endeavor is what it might say about the band’s future, through the foreshadowed new directions. There are nods to industrial and ambient music on “Bleeding Out,” shades of emotive post-rock on “Kids” and “Beck’s Theme,” straight up death metal on “Punishment Box” and even subtle hyper-pop influence on “TAH”. The real winner on the album is the single “Lake Time (Mr Rodan),” which utterly begs an alt-country foray. It’s a genre they embody with complete ease.
Any of these sounds would be welcome additions on a new record, given Chat Pile’s established command of the noise rock and sludge metal vernacular. On the making of the score the band said they were given the freedom to experiment. Most of the experiments here go over very well; hopefully it’s a spirit they carry with them into new projects.