Chat Pile – God's Country

For fans of Jesus Lizard, Melvins, Korn, Nick Cave and The Flenser. The eagerly awaited debut album by the noise rock band from Oklahoma.

Several vinyl pressings of the band's EPs on the iconic noise rock label Reptilian Records sold out quickly. There is a sick irony in the fact that a country that extols the rhetoric of individual freedom has no problem in the same breath commercializing human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism.

If this is American nihilism at its absolute peak, then God's Country, the first album by Oklahoma City noise-rock quartet Chat Pile, is the sonic embodiment of such a concept. The fatalism of everyday life in the Midwest of the USA runs like a common thread through Chat Pile's work, especially on their debut album. Fueled by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the bovine madness of global capitalism, and fueled by "...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC," God's Country is both an acknowledgment of Earth's certain demise and a snarling, violent act of defiance against it.

In its forty-plus minute runtime, the album features both Chat Pile's most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments, drawing from their two previous EPs and the score for the 2021 film Tenkiller. In the band's own words, the album is, at its core, "Oklahoma's specific brand of misery" A misery bent on sweeping everyone along with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms, rather than idly accepting its otherwise certain demise. That's what the end of the world sounds like.