God's Country - Purple

*NOW AVAILABLE ON GRIMACE PURPLE VINYL!!! Received an 8.4 Best New Music rating from Pitchfork. There's a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to it's absolute zenith, then God's Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept.Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives it's name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on it's debut album. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by "... lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC," God's Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth's most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within it's over forty minute runtime, the album displays both Chat Pile's most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from it's preceding two EPs and it's score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band's own words, the album is, at it's heart, "Oklahoma's specific brand of misery." A misery intent on taking all down with it and it's cacophonous chaos on it's own terms as opposed to idly accepting it's otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like.