Chat Pile’s logo is a bunch of indecipherable scribbles like a death metal band, but their music actually has musical DNA from a different genre that began at around the same time in the later 1980s: pigfuck.
Robert Christgau dubbed the term “pigfuck” to describe the aural violence enacted by early Sonic Youth albums.* This repulsive sobriquet would gain traction to describe antisocial, atonal music coming from bands on labels like Amphetamine Reptile and Touch and Go. They would Texas caveman groovers Scratch Acid, Steve Albini’s mechanical catalog of everyday awfulness Big Black, hallucinogenic Dadists like the early Butthole Surfers, fuzz-pedal rock deconstructionist like Royal Trux, the offensively primitive Pussy Galore, the grinding smartasses of Killdozer (whose SEO results would really get jacked up after Marvin Heemayer’s Max Max-esque rampage on the town of Granby, CO), and the queasy, working class funk of The Jesus Lizard.
Like the best bands during the heyday of pigfuck, Chat Pile is pummeling and groovy. The key to a successful noise rock band is to leaven the distortion pedal dissonance and relentless, realistic negativity with a toe-tapping beat. People will put up with a lot of misery if you can get their butts moving. But a lot of bands, even pigfuck bands, can move butts. What makes Chat Pile unique is that they have a sense of morality to them that most purveyors of ugliness don’t. “Why,” singer Raygun Busch asks, “do people have to live outside?” It’s the type of question a child would ask, but one for which there’s no good or justifiable answer. Busch keeps asking, increasingly vexed by the injustice of the world, as his vocal cords disintegrate. On “grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg,” Busch uses the hamburger mascot as a metaphor for end-stage addiction. He is by turns furious and despairing. This is America 2020s, folks.
*Funnily enough, the Sonic Youth/Christgau spat would last for several years. From what I can tell, Christgau thought Sonic Youth were pretentious boho poseurs, and they thought he was a blowhard asshole. One of the band’s operating principles, “kill yr idols” even comes from a song called “I Killed Robert Christgau With My Big Fucking Dick” – which was a lie, because the critic would go on to favorably review almost every Sonic Youth release from the late ‘80s onward (including their much agreed lowpoint NYC Ghosts and Flowers, which he rated an “A”).