Chat Pile

***Released only a handful of months following the band’s breakthrough debut EP, Remove Your Skin Please signaled that whatever Chat Pile was doing wasn't just a one-off novelty of Midwest metal nihilism. While the band’s foundational sound of caustic and cacophonous noise rock crystallized with its debut, the release of Remove Your Skin Please signposted the vast extent to which Chat Pile could stylistically tinker and conceptually iterate atop it. Heard in the gothy post-punk dirge of “Mask” and the dissonant extreme metal fervor of “Davis'', the more experimental ideas present on Remove Your Skin Please come off less like a selection of the band’s conceptual prototypes and more like fully realized reflections of its member's own tastes and preferences. That doesn’t mean Chat Pile’s noise rock foundation is diluted in the slightest as EP bookends “Dallas Beltway” and “Garbage Man” push its twisted take on the genre to new aural extremes in its instrumentation and subject matter spanning grisly serial murders to the slow festering death of the environment at the hands of mankind. For as ugly and unhinged as Chat Pile’s tales of 21st-century American dread are, Remove Your Skin Please asserts something that is somehow subtly even more terrifying: If a quartet of otherwise ordinary Okies can convey such apocalyptically bleak yet resonate messages in its music, that may mean we feel that same nihilism, too.