Sweaty Flailing and Movie Recs from Chat Pile at Club Soda

Chat Pile is a band I have wanted to see for years. I have been following them since their second EP Remove Your Skin, Please blew up in the world of heavy music just in time for 17-year-old me to stumble upon it. When they played at Le Ritz last year, the date snuck up on me and I forgot to grab a ticket in time. When I saw that they were returning so soon, with a new album under their belts, I wouldn’t make the same mistake. 

Chat Pile’s music is self-described as noise-rock but commonly lumped in with the term sludge-metal by those who care to know what that means. To me, it’s always sounded like a fine blend of the anxious, toneless riffing of no-wave era Sonic Youth, the frantic paranoid shouting of The Jesus Lizard, and a begrudging influence from early nu-metal, Korn style. While crushing, their music depends on an emotional core within. A profound dissatisfaction with the way things are, and the many ways we are conditioned to ignore this feeling, are never shied away from in their songs. The band’s name itself is in reference to the ghost towns made of old mining cities in Oklahoma, turned toxic by large piles of carcinogenic mining waste known as chat. Their music aims to break through a layer of jaded distancing and show up close the amount of unnecessary suffering this world has created.

The show had two openers. The first of which was a fellow Oklahoma City band by the name of Traindodge. They were significantly older than the Chat Pile crew but impressed in every way with their ferocity. Traindodge sounds a lot like those 90s Steve Albini noise bands that Chat Pile themselves are no doubt influenced by. They have a small, loving cult following of Midwestern fans but have never really made it outside of their local scene. They did a great job of kicking the night off and left me wanting to check out more of their music in my own time, the sign of a great opener. 

After a short break outside, the second opener stepped onstage. A Los Angeles black metal band called Agriculture. I had never been to a black metal show before and didn’t necessarily plan on it either. It’s always been one of those genres that I don’t really get. For better or for worse, that may have changed upon seeing Agriculture. I can confidently say that they were one of the best openers I have ever seen, and certainly the loudest show of my life. Louder than Lightning Bolt, louder than Dinosaur Jr.’s wall of amps in a tiny room. I could feel damage being done to my inner ear before the drums even started. They started their set with a very long, tremolo-picked guitar drone that shrieked piercing vibrations through the room. I immediately put earplugs in for fear that I don’t have many more of these left in me. This was a good call, because as soon as the whole band started playing, the floor was shaking from the noise. I thought my skull might shatter.

 Their music always sounds like an intro or an outro. There was no room for dull moments. The guitarist was constantly doing that million-a-second tremolo shred, the drummer was always punching down on the kick drum at breakneck pace, and everything sounded like a constant, debilitating swell that never seemed to fall back to earth. The impossibly screamed vocals cut through the walls of distortion and tied everything together. The music was not a well of darkness, it had this soaring, Celtic influence that turned the powerful blasts into a journey to high places. The band really showed themselves to be something special during the few quieter moments as well. When the second guitarist began singing softly, and sentimentally, you could tell that this musical project meant the world to them, and that they take what they’re doing very seriously. This attitude stood in stark contrast to Chat Pile’s fed-up ramblings, which diversified the moods of the evening. There was much more to their show than noise and abrasive flailing, and I was even able to appreciate the more traditional shredding done by the lead guitarist, something that is usually the worst part of heavy music. 

Finally, Chat Pile appeared and began with Cool World’s opening track, “I Am Dog Now.” Between songs, the singer, who goes by the pseudonym Raygun Busch, listed things he knows about Montreal. He did this during every single pause, which eventually made me believe that he had some real love for the city and wasn’t just reciting some list he pulled up before the show. Most of his quips revolved around movies that were filmed here. He’d say, “Have you guys heard of this one?” and when nobody would reply he’d say in the exact same dejected tone as everything else “Hey man it’s your culture, not mine.”  After lamenting on the loss of the Expos and complementing the films of “Denis Vil-Knee-Oove,” he dropped the world’s most casual “free Palestine, by the way” once again in that same tone, like it should be obvious to us.

A lot of that obviousness comes through in their music. Raygun’s attitude is core to the band’s ethos. By the third track, “Masc”, the man was barefoot and shirtless in little gym shorts, squealing and dancing around the stage. His shouts were so guttural they were almost burps. His moves were slimy. He flailed about, crouched down and swung his arms in a little crawl, jumped and threw his bare feet in front of him and fell backwards on the floor leaving his gut wobbling through the sheer force of the music.

 When they played the track “Why”, he looked people dead in the eyes while screaming the song’s repeated moral question; why do people have to live outside? When the crowd shouted back with the lyrics ‘We have the resources, we have the means,’ I understood the power of a track like this. 

At one point, Raygun said the word Toronto under his breath during a rant I didn’t quite catch. A few audience members swiftly yelled “fuck Toronto,” which he eventually reciprocated with a reluctant but affirming “Uh sure fuck it yeah, fuck Toronto.” 

In the room’s center was a strange mosh. It had incredible breathing room and was taking up the amount of space that a mosh for a concert of this size should, but less than fifteen people were participating. All the thrashing about that usually comes naturally in a mosh pit had to be done manually, and after running in circles without any contact a few times, I realized that their music is a little too downtempo for this kind of thing anyway. The circle itself stayed around for the whole show, through the efforts of people much more dedicated than I. 

Before the encore, he made sure to mention the Canadian film Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveler, something he’d been bringing up a lot between songs and something the audience did not seem to understand whatsoever. This angry, half-naked man was consistently shocked at our inability to recognize what he was talking about. Our culture, not his. They ended the set with the track “New World”, a favorite off the new album, followed by “Rainbow Meat”, from their very first EP. I went home amazed by how such a great performance I’ve been waiting years to see could still be outshined by an incredible opener I’d never heard of. All 3 bands killed it at Club Soda.