What do you get when you mix acoustic guitars playing folk music and the sinister atmosphere of sludge metal?
Oklahoma City’s underground and lauded sludge rock and metal quartet Chat Pile and Texan ambient and folk guitarist Hayden Pedigo could answer that question if it ever crossed your mind. Despite polarizing reactions to the singles dropped before the album, the two acts jointly released their collaborative album “In the Earth Again,” merging two starkly different sonic worlds, on Friday, Oct. 31.
“Demon Time” would make the experimental rock and freak folk band Swans feel proud of their influence. The sludgy bass mixed with the overcast acoustic guitar and Chat Pile vocalist Raygun Busch’s dejected vocals make for a simple, but effective, cocktail of doom. The gently-played but heavy electric guitar later on in the mix works really well to add to the atmosphere.
“Never Say Die!” sounds more like a traditional Chat Pile song. Pedigo’s glistening guitar works well as an aesthetic decoration to the menacing sound wall that defines the band’s sound. This song also has the most fleshed out lyrics on the entire album with lyrics like “Don’t be caught by the revelation / Don’t get crushed under the violent wheels of change” and “And there was no world / Without the blood of your children / Without the pain of the masses / Without the screams of eight billion.” The lyrics could have been even more disturbing and detailed to drive home the nihilistic message, but the sonic landscape tells the tacit story.
“Behold A Pale Horse” references the Book of Revelation’s harbingers of doom Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; particularly, the horseman of death. It’s extremely fitting for a Chat Pile song. The guitar work is incredibly well done both from an acoustic and electric front, sounding similar to an atmospheric black metal album interlude.
Pedigo’s masterful guitar work is on full display on “The Magic of the World” and “I Got My Own Blunt to Smoke.” Both songs only feature an acoustic guitar and, in the case of the former, Busch’s deep vocals. For a song with such a whimsical title, the lyrics are dystopian, dismal and oddly romantic despite the depressing subject material of witnessing the world’s end. It’s a jarring juxtaposition, but one that has a lot to like about it.
“Fission/Fusion,” which references two ways nuclear energy can create a lot of energy, breaks the harmony found in the sound of “The Magic of the World.” The album slaps you with a chaotic wall of sound that fizzles out into a post-punk-adjacent interlude with a heavy bass tone and a dialogue sample about forgiving.
Another lyrically fleshed out song is “The Matador,” which sounds very much like a typical Chat Pile song with the chugging guitars, heavy post-punk-like drums and lyrics about hopelessness and suicide.
“Radioactive Dreams” was the lead single for “In the Earth Again,” and although it did a terrible job of showing the audience what the album was actually going to sound like, it was genuinely beautiful and something so bittersweet, especially for a nihilistic and depressive band like Chat Pile.
Hearing Busch sing dystopian yet touching lyrics reading similar to poetry like “So I’m sitting now / Half in the earth / With the ghosts of my friends / And the ghost of the world / And the echo is endless / So I share my song / With the veins of the soil / And the angels of the earth / And God” to a bright and melodic acoustic guitar then backed up by the rest of Chat Pile’s instrumentation is oddly heartwarming and hopeful for a band like this. It was a low bar, but one that was surpassed.
Collaboration, especially with artists of different genres, is a beautiful thing. Although this album was extremely unfocused, scattered and inconsistent, the ideas that stuck stayed well. Pedigo’s guitar work was an excellent addition to Chat Pile’s dismal and oppressive atmosphere. Pedigo shows that, sonically, Chat Pile could be even more than how they market themselves while still being authentic to their vision all the way through.
Rating: 3.5/5