Chat Pile & Hayden Pedigo
In the Earth Again
COMPUTER STUDENTS
For their latest venture, Oklahoma City avant-garde noise-rockers Chat Pile teamed up with Texas native Hayden Pedigo, an American-primitivist guitarist, songwriter, and performance artist who first rose to national attention for his Lynchian campaign ads during a 2018 city council bid in Amarillo. Pedigo’s discography is largely made up of ambient and acoustic folk, while Chat Pile’s is one of bludgeoning sludge metal and distortion. Needless to say, their resulting collaboration, In the Earth Again, couldn’t be more unexpected—especially on paper—due to their distinctive and diverging sounds.
Given that their respective styles obviously aren’t typically paired with each other, bringing them together immediately adds a sense of intrigue. But knowing their respective oeuvres, that contrast and tension is probably the point. The story goes that Pedigo and company cooked up their collaboration at a tiki bar while talking about the best way to approach their then-untitled project after ditching their initial plan for a split album. The resulting In the Earth Again combines elements of slowcore, acoustic folk, noise rock, and ambient sound with an angsty narrative evoking Faulkner-esque Gothic decay and T.S. Eliot’s apocalyptic cynicism. Vocalist Raygun Busch brilliantly word-paints an impressionistic landscape of doom and regret as the instrumental builds toward the band’s signature heaviness. At other times, the pastoral music invokes an unexpected spark of hope with its uplifting suspended chords.
Decay, destruction, and cynicism may be the themes of In the Earth Again, but instrumentally, they make it sound so beautiful and lush. Opener “Outside” works as a sort of title card, a floaty, mellow instrumental announcing the bittersweet philosophical battle about to unfold, like a calm before the storm. “Demon Time” is deceptively gentle, but the flourishes of distorted guitar and the lyrics are foreboding, hinting at what’s to come. “Never Say Die!” cranks up the anger and noise, with Busch's guttural vocals perfectly fitting the guitars and intense drums. We get a short respite from the heaviness on “Behold the Pale Horse” and “The Magic of the World” before an explosive return to noise rock on “Fission / Fusion,” an apocalyptic instrumental interlude that cleverly uses dissonance and noise to make its point.
The way the band sways between genres and intensity on In the Earth Again—from ambient to noise rock, from angst to catharsis—creates an engrossingly cinematic sense of harmony that’s both compelling and imaginative. Its success is in its artistic adventurousness, which takes the listener on an intense ride. The Halloween release date makes sense with all of this framing—after all, what’s scarier than the complexity of reality?
