One of the best things about being a band that has as crystal-clear an MO as Chat Pile does is that they can even weaponize something as simple as the faded-out song title for an upcoming album sitting there on Apple Music like a bunch of presents under the tree a couple days before Christmas. Take “Funny Man”, the third single from the upcoming Cool World, which dropped last night with little to no warning. Even before the song was out, I’d picked it out of the teased track list and thought to myself, bet it’s not that funny at all. Bet it’s actually pretty messed up. See? They’re in my fuckin head. I can’t trust anything.
With “Funny Man”, something of a sonic theme for the album might be officially emerging. Like “Masc” and “I Am Dog Now” before it, “Funny Man” has a simple but fixed verse-chorus structure, something the band are proving increasingly effective at using as a sort of precision rifling to direct their unique off-ness to the target. God’s Country saw them experimenting with their frankly shocking combination of caveman nu metal and Raygun Busch’s performance-art mascotting of the American monstrous; the results were wild and unpredictable, just shaped enough to be called songs and not Mamaleeks, but endlessly compelling. Cool World seems to be asking “What if we were a rock band?”
“Funny Man” cruises along on something just to the left of a riff, like a bounce-groove fresh out of rehab and still very fucking shaky. Raygun’s working in a higher, more anxious register than usual, the words spilling out of him; lyrically, we’re working with strong stuff: “I broke my knees upon the pearl & onyx/In the hall of trophies built to honor my father. Spilled the blood, gave em as much as they wanted/Still had to dance for my supper/Still had to give them my body.” The song seems to be showing the bare shame under the work shirt of servitude. As Raygun puts it, the song is about “...being a servant, indentured or otherwise…essentially it concerns the illusion vs. reality in regards to America and war.” The title apparently comes from an obscure British film, but according to Busch is otherwise unrelated.
A couple of references to “A new beginning” and “the final chapter” that land late in the lyric sheet nod toward Busch’s well-known love for the Friday the 13th film series, and draw a pointed connection between those films’ unkillable death golem and the “servants” fighting American wars, all of it casting a gimlet and uniquely-Chat Pile eye on America and its cineplex nightmares, both seemingly always down for another round.
Check out the video below.
