Ezekiel RodofiliI’ve been trying to work out what to say about Cool World, Chat Pile’s currently most recent non-collaborative album. It’s an excellent album, incisive, sometimes harrowing, those sorts of things. A tight-sounding, absolutely intense affair, and it doesn’t present itself as anything other than what it is: a deep, unrestrained and frustrated scream. That’s the best I’ve come up with, but I’m going to try and ramble off the cuff and see what comes forward, and hopefully say something more.
Cool World is a very dark, very pitch album, as Chat Pile deliver their songs bluntly. Their words are straightforward, though at the same time there’s an indirectness to them. They hit hard through what is permeating, what is building from them; this sense of unease, stress and anxiety. Some dread, too.
The vocal delivery moves from this disaffected, sort of flat-feeling, and occasionally sarcastic drawl with something lurking underneath, to a pretty violent, flooding scream. It matches the words; it does exactly what they need, and it meets the instruments in what they’re doing. So you get this really big sounding… well, sound, that’s quite intense and visceral, and refuses to let up. It comes through thick, grinds and grinds and grinds away, doesn’t let up and pushes down. It pushes and crashes against you.
There’s an effective use of melody throughout Cool World, and I wonder if it is to provide some sort contrast or counterbalance, or something similar. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t diminish the power of what is going on. It helps bolster the album’s overall cold sound and muscularly work-like structuring in a lot of places. It also allows room for groove, and some of the stuff here is genuinely groovy to the point that, despite the intensity of the music and subject matter, you could quite easily dance a good bit of the stuff here.
Cool World is an exploratory album presented both singularly and variably. There’s focus, there’s drive, and there’s intent to unflinchingly dig into deeply concerning issues. Whilst the songs themselves are pretty uniform sound-wise, there’s enough in them to prevent the album from growing monotonous. The album is one with practical and economical use of sound and instrumentation. It ends up being quite maximal for it, even in the more “subdued” moments. This better services the subject matter, which is stuff that has been presented before, but still hits hard. Perhaps that’s why Cool World is as intense as it is; within it is a genuine frustration its subject matter is still relevant.