Chat Pile - Who Loves the Sun Review
Oklahoma’s oracles of the detritus of late-stage capitalism return to dispatch a communication from the depths. Raging with noise rock fury and steeped in a working-class consciousness of cultural collapse, it’s an essential plea to jettison the systems that have rendered us powerless for so long.
In his 2002 essay ‘Junkspace’, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas defined the concept of ‘junkspace’ as the ‘residue that mankind leaves on this planet’. Airports, shopping centres, car parks and office blocks were some of his targets: uniform, vapid constructs whose nullifying air conditioning, aggressive strip lighting and blurred lines between window and screen curate purposefully disorienting and endless spaces, a limitless entrapment within capital’s apotheosis. Junkspace commands us to ‘relax, enjoy, be well,’ Koolhaas noted: ‘we’re united in sedation . . . Why can’t we tolerate stronger sensations? Dissonance? Awkwardness? Genius? Anarchy?’
Chat Pile have arguably posed the same questions. Their sludge-metal/noise rock hybrid has consistently lit down on multiple wells of contemporary acquiescence to systems of power, the pervasion of organised religion, violence and corporatisation all engaged across an already packed discography. Even on their unlikely collaboration with ambient Americana stalwart Hayden Pedigo last year, you couldn’t accuse them of being relaxed, its scorched-earth post-rock still unafraid to let the dirt rise to the surface audibly or lyrically.
Indeed, Who Loves the Sun takes junkspace as its thematic backbone, synthesising the commercialised degradation of the quartet’s home of Oklahoma City with its macrocosmic designs of global sedation. One of Koolhaas’ objects of disgust looms on the album art, OKC’s Devon Tower (the city’s largest structure) gazing over a burned-out building and neighbouring tent. An example of the ‘architectural cloning’ theorised by both Jeans Baudrillard and Nouvel, the tower is a replica of the dozens of other late-capitalist skyscrapers that dominate cities’ hubs of production. When just considering the horizon line, this photo could have likely been taken anywhere; it takes the erosion of what lies beneath to return to reality.
Masking the real has been a preoccupation of Chat Pile ever since their second EP, 2019’s Remove Your Skin Please, a track with some titular variation of ‘mask’ becoming a requirement for each ensuing release. Previously, it’s been a way to flee from confronting an undesirable self (‘Mask’), a costume to the opposite strands of masculinity (‘The Masks’ and ‘Masc’) and a barrier between the oppressive strains of conforming (‘Masks’). On lead single ‘Deep Blue’, though, the distinction of hyperreality has become close to non-existent, nullified by screens and the everlasting cycle of work. ‘Feel the skin on your face melt down and feel all the best parts of yourself drown,’ vocalist Ray B. commands, the ringleader to a ghastly spate of self-inflicted commodity fetishisation.
This enforced ignorance of one’s own exploitation is a theme ‘PEN I S MALL’ also spotlights, albeit shorn of the embodiment of acceptance ‘Deep Blue’ illustrates. While the latter flirted with the gothic filigree of deathrock, plateaus of L. Manhole’s chorused guitar tiptoeing amongst the grungier jetsam, ‘PEN I S MALL’ is an industrial bludgeoning from the start. Crushed under the bootheels of Stin and Cap’n Ron’s rhythm section, the menial barrage positions modernist mall junkspaces as the new factory floor, its breakdown reminding us of the coughs that produce the carcass screams stretching to the sinuous snapping point.
Capital’s colonisation of time as an endless well of workforce is rightfully seen as a cause for sorrow by Ray throughout the LP. ‘Shrine’ courses with atmospheric sludge tension and release, pulsing through anxious clean vocals and keeled-over shouts as it laments the ‘morbid shrine’ erected through this ‘age of meaningless conquest’. Even unions of love can’t be shielded from irrevocable decline, ‘Family Funeral’ conflating marriage with a death sentence in a world that will choke every last breath of expendable energy, a wrath unbound by generation. Paired with similarly suffocating backing, where guitar bends garrotte a particularly cruel bassline, it presents bringing up a child in this climate as tantamount to an act of reflexive violence.
Cutting off harshly at the close, it slams into ‘October All the Time’, a near-acoustic number that returns to the blankness expounded in ‘Deep Blue’. A collection of faux affirmations (‘everything will be fine, the sun will continue to shine’) it’s unsettling in its permeating restraint: less a warm embrace, more Damoclean hug, the knife trembling not too far from the neck.
Ending on a question mark was doubtless Chat Pile’s intention, for there can be a safety in the complicity of nihilism. Despite the naked depictions of humanity’s flagellations within and its awareness of decline, Who Loves the Sun is far from a philosophy of acceptance. Broiling with the band’s most firebrand rage yet, it would (to twist the Fredric Jameson adage) prefer not to imagine the end of the world before the end of capitalism: an admission, masked by the machinations of destructive overstimulation, that there is still something worth saving. That is true power.