Chat Pile doesn’t sound like it would sound very good on paper: sludge punk guitars, 80s-style drum production, and scuzzy bass lines ripping beneath spoken-word diatribes about systemic poverty, grief, critiques of organized religion, and drug-induced hallucinations of Grimace, the McDonald’s character, smoking weed.
To be honest, I’m not sure it sounds that good off of paper either. There’s not much here that sounds beautiful by conventional standards.
But for all its ugliness, there is a power here that cuts through its lack of listenability and lack of hooks and grasps your attention anyway. And if you let it take you, you’re in for quite a ride.