Dear Justin,
“Not the way I wanna live; just the way I gotta live.”
I’m writing this to you from a Tim Horton’s in Langford, BC. Tim Horton’s—if you don’t know—is a chain of fast food armpits that exists everywhere in Canada, overlit, filmy, crumb-blasted, slinging plasticky donuts and burnt-ass coffee. It’s not quite “Rainbow Meat”, but it is fast food, in that nothing is actually baked or brewed anywhere ever, it all just shows up frozen in a truck and is ER’d to life somewhere out of sight and then put on a rack for you to point at. But even though it’s not silently screaming with the suffering of millions of mutant cattle bred for the omni-maw like the competition, it’s sort of offensive in its own way, in that it’s real product is pretty much Canadian Identity itself, which Tim’s has somehow riveted onto our national psyche through decades of commercials that weaponize pond hockey and mittens holding steaming cups and white children in toques against a fragile people who—I’m gonna be real with you here—spend at least part of every week congratulating ourselves and each other for not being Americans. That’s our secret, Justin; we’re so desperate to be told we’re special that we’ll make billionaires out of whoever is selling us literally the worst coffee anyone’s ever tasted—swear to God, like they boiled a handful of lug nuts next to an unopened can of Folger’s--because we saw it next to four seconds of well-filmed shinny. All this is to say that if there was an Arby’s across the street I’d be in there; at least they’re not pretending they’re my hometown.
Still, there’s nothing in the world that feels more half-abandoned than a mostly empty fast food place at night, especially in a place like Langford where only cars live. It’s like everyone saw something slouching towards the east and just fled. Even the part of the overhead light spectrum feels missing. Which makes a good vibe for writing. Let’s talk about Chat Pile.
Chat Pile is my antidote to this sort of daily encounter with the thing we’ve let happen to us. The Parasite. Chat Pile are great because they don’t pretend you’re on the front lines with a pee-soaked bandana and a protocol for when the cops push like Rage, or read you Wikipedia articles like System; they just say the thing that you see, and that’s pretty fucking powerful. Theraputic. You’re not crazy, Chat Pile says. The Parasite is fucking crazy, Chat Pile says. I can’t thank them enough for just witnessing and feeling in front of me, the way they do. So when Chat Pile drops a record, I drop everything.
“If you want precision, I hope you caught Deafheaven”
We’ve talked about this, but I kind of have a soft spot for live records, in spite of all the reasons not to. When I was a kid, before I knew anything about stopgap releases or contract fulfilments, live records really hit me with the fact that the music I would hear on a regular, studio record, was also a thing that could happen to real people in space and time. I’d hear the crowd cheer and the band talk and the guitars let out little flares of heat like they were being held back during the banter and little islands of reality would open up outside my lived experience, the captured concerts becoming worlds that existed completely in spite of me, like the places my mom went when I had a babysitter, or Hawaii, where I knew my grandparents had been and therefore definitely existed.
So now we know Chat Pile actually exists. Existence proven. We now get to hear them roaring the contradictions out on the Roadburn stage to the biggest audience they’d ever faced. I feel there are two true revelations on this record, which is actually only 9 songs and swerves quickly from a trio of God’s Country cuts down into the gutters of the EPs. One is the utter glory of the bass mix on this thing. Play exactly one second of “Why?” and feel Stin’s huge bass tone hit you like Gabriel’s trumpets--apocalyptic, mountain-gargling, titanic. It’s unbelievably dope, and frankly critical to a live Chat Pile recording feeling at all essential when you have records like Cool World sitting right there. Live sound on record, even from expensive bands, can be really hit and miss, flattening studio dynamics into sonic hospital food, so the immediacy of this mix really surprised me. Are all Roadburn recordings like this? Who’s responsible? Take a Grammy away from some Benson Boone-ass guy and give it to them.
“What a guy.”
The second revelation isn’t actually a revelation to anyone who follows Raygun on IG, which we both do. Every odd-numbered track on this record is a banter cut, which tells me this band knows that Ray’s persona, your across-the-alley Okie neighbour, all beer cans and salt of the earth socialism who owns 1200 VHS tapes but maybe no shirts, is best served 1:1 with the songs. On IG stories, Ray’s all about movies and his bathrobe, and on stage in Holland he tips his hat to Paul Verhoeven and his cranked, America-goofing sci-fi masterpieces, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (invoked as co-inspiration for the song “Pamela” along with the Friday the 13th films), and then, after checking to see if they have Arby’s in the low countries, circles back to essentially asking the crowd if they’d seen any good movies lately. “We saw Evil Dead Rise the first night we were here,” he tells the crowd, to no real reaction. Rolling with it, Ray muses, “The Italians love Evil Dead; they made a bunch of fake sequels! The La Casa series…” My favourite moment is probably when, in the lead in to “Dallas Beltway”, he simply declares “Dallas is one of the worst places on earth. Don’t ever go there.” Beltways are the best way to experience the metastatic horror of urbanized mankind, so I’m happy to trust him on that.
“Setlists are for cowards”
Justin, I do have one actual thought I want to run by you. I feel like one side effect of the power of this mix is that the band sounds relatively huge in ratio to Ray, which is not how they’re mixed in the studio. It has the result of bringing the experience away from the way Ray’s words get into your head and back down into your body, which makes Live at Roadburn maybe the only Chat Pile record I’ve listened to and walked away feeling honestly kind of pumped and joyful, as opposed to unsettled and exposed. “Why” hits so hard as an opener, but with those thick, soil-black riffs rolling through, I felt more awed than gutted, which is how I feel when I take in the God’s Country version. Ditto for “Pamela”, which hit me here as rubbery and even funky, in a gothy Bauhaus sort of way, like they unlocked a whole new Chat flavor, while “Anywhere” just plain kicks ass, especially during the instrumental outflow, where Stin and Cap’n Ron just dig in and dilate around Luther Manhole’s searching, hungryman guitar. That minute-plus feels like the centerpiece of the record to me, and it lives and heaves and breathes in a way that I’m not sure another moment on any of their other records quite does.
None of this is a complaint, I want to make clear. If anything, it feels like I found something here I didn’t know was missing. Since you’ve seen them live and I haven’t, my question to you is, a) do you hear what I’m hearing? And b) if so, is this just accurate, as far as the live Chat Pile experience goes? Do they bring both the truth and its cure to their live shows?
Hit me back, my friend. Yours in arms,
Josh
Dear Josh,
Paul Verhoeven was completely out of mind when I decided to watch Basic Instinct for the first time this past weekend. I’d known some of what was in store since I heard Tatum Riley interject the title against the apparent absurdity of a female killer in Scream thirty years ago. “That was an ice pick,” horror hound and resident meta-narrator Randy responds. “Not exactly the same thing.”
I lay next to my boyfriend while rain berated his double-wide’s soggy roof in stupid outbursts for three days and nights. We customarily caulked the gaps between naps with a drowsy run of films I usually choose to stream based on their potential to placate him—that new Tom Hardy hard-boiler, Havoc, for example—or to whittle down my personal watchlist, which is naturally predisposed to Raygun Busch recommendations or thick with pathetic reflections of my own volatile romance. In both categories are Guadagnino’s Queer, the art collector’s cud of which we chewed in two attempts, and Companion—a rewatch that, though I’d previously finished it feeling like Shiva the Destroyer, left me frustrated by forgiveness in the scent of my man’s armpit. What a polar swerve after I’d watched a Sharon Stone/Jean Tripplehorn body double absolutely aerate pornstar Bill Cable in Basic Instinct’s opening scene, when what scared me was how gratifying I found the ice pick’s strike, every time.
Almost a year ago to the day I drove us to Chattanooga to meet my friends and see Chat Pile perform at Poor Taste, a clothing boutique shoved open into a modest bottleneck venue. Midway through the Nightosphere opener set my bar tab was already foaming through all six feet and four inches of his industrial craning over tiny goth girlfriends who weren’t (and probably never would be) in the mood to match his bounce, and I felt responsible for this ebullient hillbilly kaiju who would definitely burn out or launch a Tennessee hipster-crust brawl long before Portrayal of Guilt could even earn that kind of churn. By the time the boys were setting up—Ron had yet to drop the goggles or drape himself in the sweater—we’d argued in an alley and I let his ass choose to stew in the jeep. In November I went to the Nashville show at The End without him.
I’m at least one of the problems here, but I’m serious as a heart attack about live Chat Pile. When I saw them in Chicago with my buddy Dave three years ago, we regarded his pacemaker as we would a metronome—periodically acknowledged it—and still sprawled our carcasses all over Stin’s monitor like mops made of muppet limbs. (Literal blood already streaked the pit floor, courtesy of meth.’s frontman; for months I kept the clotted setlist in a ziplock.) This was five hours of Amtrak ass scent and a brandless, transubstantiated meal-car breakfast sandwich from their St. Louis appearance, where the stage comprised a few stripes of tape around a couple feet of rescued drum rug and, in my first encounter with the band, I was close enough to consider that one of Raygun’s “unknown concepts” could be to headbutt me the fuck outta his grill. But, six shows later, my body can’t abide being anywhere else in the room. I’ve consistently bought tickets for and attended with friends like it’s my Good News mission to incubate new Chat Pile hosts, but I will willingly abandon some of the best people alive to risk catching a tuning knob to the eye from this guy who could be a record store clerk with a bass that sounds plugged directly into a steamy pay-per-view of Stephen King’s Christine and a rancor.
Which are the live albums that turned you on? I’ve never much cared for live metal records as units because the bass mix is often so weak it both personally disrespects me and misses more than half the point. To mic an audience while emaciating the low-end that syncs their spines is kind of a menace move. Inside the coliseum of bullshit that leaves me desperately grateful for a band like Chat Pile and a record like Live at Roadburn is this dopey animal.
Another is that proof of existence you mention. In your DMs I was waxing about waxing, “what kind of packaging we accept for imitations of analog ‘human’ experiences,” which sounds dickish. Whatever. I’m sick of this country, Josh. Wheeling between its humongous and mundane unrealities exhausts me. My blood poisons itself, stocking cholesterol and sugar like a morbid go-bag waiting for the right raid siren. Calling a conglomerate of corporations suckled unequivocally by my Black death or my broke suffering “my country” at all, residing in a building below local occupancy code while living on the contingency that I pay a percentage to massacre Palestinians with breaktaking innovation, and wincing at small moments of recovery broken by knowing that some Cialised pink phallus gets a raise for every tear gas canister the palace guard gang catapults into groups of students whose tuitions are positively correlative to said erection: it’s a daily humiliation, and they obviously don’t expect me to dissociate anymore because even the peddled diversions are piss-poor. The fuck if I’m gonna stumble outta this ontological asswhooping into a Staind concert where another peeled prick cosplays antihero to a puddle of big-titted warrior-tatted larvae who slapped that thin-blue-line Punisher doodle on a polished Ram 1500 while the dealer tag still stuttered in the wind.
“All cops are bast-turds,” sing-songs a proper frontman. “Fuckum,” just in case anyone’s still unconvinced that “Crawlspace” is (really sharp) satire.
Answer’s yeah, Live at Roadburn’s accurate; I know because it makes me happy. Like you I felt my little head pop out of the fist with atypical glee: I was grinning in traffic. My one window in the mill of American automatism is a Chat Pile set where I feel briefly real in my skin, to have the filth and affliction of this catastrophic project affirmed with heart instead of algorithm. I think the pulse of that (what I wanna call “booty”) might justify how Big R’s more medium here. Listening to Couch Slut’s Live at Roadburn 2024, released the following week, I’d entertain a folk legend of a Tilburg farm where they raise the humans whose navels run lines out to the mixer, but not quite enough to send in documentarists. The boys are barely a studio band as it is; they track live and like to diss quantizing. Their least fleshy component, Cap’n Ron’s echoing e-kit, is always replaced by the real deal onstage, and arguably in its place here is this possible third revelation: the presence of air—tremors, trembles, flutters, buzzes. I think I’m talkin about the audible action of Luther’s guitar and the business around its strings in “Tropical Beaches, Inc.”; or it’s how the air feels displaced like a boot newly full of foot the second Stin enters “Cut”; or it’s even Raygun trying to catch his breath on banter tracks, christening the elastic outro of “Anywhere” his “relax song,” and how the whole minute of Track 13’s his attention reaching back to the boys and then out to the big room like an EQ slider for the just-hangin-out frequency. But I’m definitely talkin about hearing Ron’s hi-hat as one panting (also pantsing) lung of the “Pamela” verse like never before.
“Pamela?”
“Pamela.”
The swagger in that chord Luther teases on Track 5 could choke a horse. I can hear the crowd vibrate toward it the way I imagine any element will before a lightning strike. Those seconds of anticipation hold the most familiar sensation this record transmits.
“Ughohh, we love you too, thank you so much” sounds right. I don’t know what it means to truly love anything or anyone from within these systems, man. Do you? Like, I understand language is arrested so that people can be, and a half-life of witnessing advancing brutalities reduce people’s being to just urgent survival is hellbent on eroding my empathy and my tongue. It isn’t subtle. I love Chat Pile, meaning I practice gratitude for their being bright guys who invite me, as well as the 300 to 3,000 others, to collaborate on our present reality (i.e., exchanging energy or choosing the next song), and who contribute to my will to live with no harm done and nothing owed.
Lately it’s enough that someone agrees we’re both right fuckin here and heard.
Glad you’re one of em,
Justin
