2 out of 5

Label: Computer Students

Produced by: Chat Pile, Hayden Pedigo (recorded by)

Chat Pile gets recommended to me by algorithm quite a bit. If I’m doing some album shopping online, or bandcamping, or some type of streaming, they’re getting rotated in. People who listen to what I listen to listen to them. The art looks cool; there’s the promise of a death metal logo; and setting that aside – I’m down with sludge rock, and that’s how they’re billed.

Chat Pile has been taste-tested by me, several times over. Occasionally, my ears get it wrong, so in each of the above scenarios, I’m like: why not, let’s give Chat Pile another listen.

Here I will yuck some yums: they are alright. They are alright in a way that I think I understand, but that is very dismissive: they are the Queens of the Stone Age or The White Stripes for indie sludge: they package a genre well. I can dig some QotSA tracks, and will catch myself nodding to the Stripes here and there; I’m also not really fans of them. It’s… fine. With more grace, I will acknowledge their successes at what they do very well. A better comparison here might be something more narrow, like The Locust, who also do what they do well, but in a way that triggers me as rather performative. I mean, duh with The Locust, but it’s to an extent that bypasses the music for me. And that’s kind of where I sit with Chat Pile, whose alterna-names and, yeah, death metal logo both start to irk me as performative; the blandly messaged “I scream fuck about the world’s plights” lyrics an easy layup for ‘elevating’ a band’s integrity. But setting all of that aside (while my teeth are grit), I can still acknowledge: they rock acceptably. I don’t think it delivers anything new, but when they hit a groove, they hit it. Fair.

And then they add Hayden Pedigo to the mix, and it feels a step too far to me. Now we’re going to take our performative rock and make it “different” by smooshing it with with finger-picked folk guitar. Did you say you wanted to up Chat Pile’s emo-adjacent tendencies? Y’know – the moments where they start to sound more like mewithoutYou or Thursday; I’m sure you’d prefer to increase those, and to sprinkle in acoustic songs / interludes where the music sounds like Dashboard Confessional and singer Raygun Busch gets to sound like Conor Oberst… perfect.

It is, at least, a perfect way to trigger me further, clearly.

If I’m already grading on a curve of “alright,” I think the sin of In The Earth Again is that it lacks peaks. Those peaks don’t have to be strictly songs where the bass thuds and there’s screaming, but whether it’s the Pedigo-forward tunes or the Chat Pile ones – we do alternate a bit – the album never quite hits a stride. An intro lead into a song that has an interstitial sensibility, followed by a rocker that just kind of lands on a riff and keeps doing the same. The material feels almost leashed by the need to shift the spotlight around; there is an attempt at marrying the artists’ different styles, it just results in something that, to me, never quite satisfies on any front. And if we’re circling back around to my sniffing this as somewhat surface level in general – which I’ll again accept as a b.s. complaint from a dude who’s never written any music, but nonetheless – then the entirety of Earth is a shallow spin on the linear sludge the band usually delivers.

Fans will be pleased but not challenged; it’s a good changeup, perhaps, and maybe gives them a reason to explore Pedigo, but I think that there aren’t really any standout moments delivered by either artist, relegating it to being “folksy” Chat Pile album.