Weekly Review: Chat Pile – God’s Country
hey yall! this week, for the weekly review, we’re listening to God’s Country, the 2022 debut album from Chat Pile.
God’s Country is a deliberately bleak record. opening with Slaughterhouse is already pretty intense, but this album touched on gun violence of different flavors in Anywhere and The Mask (God’s Country), drug use in Wicked Puppet Dance and the closer, grimace_smoking_weed.jpg, and even the tracks about media, Pamela and Tropical Beaches, Inc., are about violence and exploitation. i think lyrically, the track that effected me most was Why – a simple, repeated, earnest question of “why do people have to live outside?”. because thats ultimately the question at the core of the record, right? why are we like this? why is America, god’s country, like this? i dont think its a question Chat Pile sets out to (or needs to!) answer directly – i think it is both effectively left as an excercise in reflection, but also left pointedly unstated. they don’t have Slaughterhouse and Why back to back for no reason, i think.
and the album does not disappoint musically – there is a bleak, heavy air that pervades every corner of this album. heavy, brutal riffs and coarse, yelled vocals sit side by side with more reflective, somber, but no less intense melodies as Pamela sits between Why and Wicked Puppet Dance. the album seems to plunge forward until the sharp change in I Don’t Care If I Burn, which for the majority of the track is a more sung-spoken over the sound of crackling flames.
i think, if youre a common reader of my reviews, that you would probably accurately guess that this album will not be on regular rotation for me. it is, at the end of the day, not really my style. but i’d like to note here, for the record, outside my normal subjective “give an album a number to note how much i liked it” space, that i think this is an extremely well-crafted record, and an exceedingly tight package for the thematic and sonic space it covers.
faves – Why
dislikes –
God’s Country – 8/10
i’ll be back next week to listen to Mastodon’s Crack the Skye – in the meantime, please let me know what album you’d like me to review below!
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