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PILE

Cover of I've Felt Better by Dinosaur Pile-Up.

Dinosaur Pile-Up

I've Felt Better

MASC

    Overcoming life-threatening illness and finding fresh perspective on true priorities, English alt. rock supremos Dinosaur Pile-Up roar back from the brink with defiant fifth album 'I've Felt Better'.

    Struggle. Vulnerability. Pain. Resilience. Love. It's been a hell of a journey. In many ways, brilliant, shapeshifting opener - and lead single - ''Bout To Lose It' begins at the end, dropping us into the shoes of a frontman chomping at the bit to get back to business but low on confidence, unsure if fans still give a damn after so much time away: 'I guess I'm back on the edge / Maybe I never left! / Would have been nice if you cared / But what did I expect?!' He needn't worry. Bursting with attitude, 'I've Felt Better's hook-laden title-track is both confirmation that DPU haven't lost a step and subtle expansion of the broader themes of strength in the face of adversity, transforming from lament for lost momentum to damning critique of a pop-cultural landscape gone mad.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. 'Bout To Lose It
    2. I've Felt Better
    3. Punk Kiss
    4. Sick Of Being Down
    5. My Way / Big Dogs
    6. Big You And Me
    7. Love's The Worst
    8. Quasimodo Melonheart
    9. Sunflower
    10. Unfamiliar
    11. I Don't Love Nothing And Nothing Loves Me

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    Cover of Sunshine And Balance Beams by Pile.

    Pile

    Sunshine And Balance Beams

    Sooper Records

      'Sunshine and Balance Beams', Pile’s ninth album, is a Sisyphean parable concerned with labor and living. To write it, singer Rick Maguire inhabited “a dark place,” wrestling with the concept that there is no enlightenment, no end to suffering. Maguire explores workaholism, the myth of meritocracy, and acceptance of mortality—all through a devilish allegory of trudging through a shadowy forest towards the uncertain dream of a bright clearing.

      Pile wrestles with existential and social contradictions by evoking sonic in-betweens. The music exists somewhere in the temporary equilibrium of light and shadow, chaos and order. Heated rain-like guitars, shifting drums that pave sinuous roads in sound and pace, eerie synths, and aqueous strings add to a panoramic production of loud-quiet dynamism matching the emotionality of the band’s thunderous performances.

      The group also favored freewheeling performances that would animate the storytelling, while enlisting a string section (violins, viola, cello) to perform incandescent, through-composed arrangements co-written by cellist Eden Rayz and Pile. They drew inspiration from cinema and opera scores by Chopin, Bernard Herrmann, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, lending 'Sunshine...' a larger-than-life sound that intensifies Pile’s blistering realizations of some of their most accessible songwriting to date.

      The recording is a noticeable leap in production value, and centers Maguire’s vocals in new and exciting ways. Pile traveled to Pawtucket, RI for two weeks of tracking at Machines with Magnets with longtime engineer Miranda Serra (Kal Marks, Kira McSpice). The album was mixed by Seth Manchester (Lightning Bolt, Mdou Moctar), and Mastered by Matt Colton (Aphex Twin, Swans, Muse). 'Sunshine and Balance Beams' is Pile’s first album for Chicago’s Sooper Records.

      TRACK LISTING

      1. Balance Beams (LP Only)
      2. An Opening
      3. Deep Clay
      4. A Loosened Knot
      5. Bouncing In Blue
      6. Uneasy
      7. Holds
      8. Born At Night
      9. Meanwhile Outside
      10. Carrion Song

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      Cover of This Dungeon Earth / Remove Your Skin Please - 2025 Repress by Chat Pile.

      Chat Pile

      This Dungeon Earth / Remove Your Skin Please - 2025 Repress

      Flenser

        In the spring of 2019, a new rock band consisting of four otherwise ordinary Okies would arise out of seemingly nowhere, swiftly turning heads with a grotesque new take on noise rock fuelled by the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. Taking its name from the towering mounds of toxic waste that stand as monuments to capitalism’s cruel hubris across its home state, Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile made an immediate impression, soon culminating in the release of its landmark 2022 debut album, 'God’s Country' and 2024’s expansive follow up 'Cool World'.

        While the massive success of 'God’s Country' would propel the quartet from the status of underground favorites to an international sensation, Chat Pile’s mission to take rock music to new zeniths of intensity was part of the plan from the very start. In fact, during its first handful of months as an active project, Chat Pile began writing and recording some of the heaviest, hellish, and harrowing music of its entire catalogue, laying the foundation of the themes and traits that would eventually manifest in the band’s debut LP. The result of these sessions would be a pair of EPs, 'This Dungeon Earth' and 'Remove Your Skin Please', released in the summer and winter of 2019, respectively.

        Initially put out by Reptilian Records in 2020, The Flenser is proud to present a special reissue of Chat Pile’s pivotal first two EPs, each compiled onto a single disc. This dual EP compilation chronicles the earliest moments of the Oklahoma City quartet’s discography, a snapshot of the band’s pre-Flenser days and of the eight tracks of noxious, nihilistic noise rock that would propel the Midwest band to a globe-spanning, underground heavyweights.

        TRACK LISTING

        1. Face
        2. Rainbow Meat
        3. Rat Boy
        4. Crawlspace
        5. Dallas Beltway
        6. Mask
        7. Davis
        8. Garbage Man

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        Cover of God's Country by Chat Pile.

        Chat Pile

        God's Country

        Elenser

          For fans of Jesus Lizard, Melvins, Korn, Nick Cave and The Flenser. Must anticipated debut full-length from Oklahoma-based noise rock band. Multiple vinyl pressing of the band’s EPs on cult noise rock label Reptilian Records have quickly sold out. 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 its 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 its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut album. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fuelled 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 its over forty minute runtime, the album displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like.

          TRACK LISTING

          1 Slaughterhouse
          2 Why
          3 Pamela
          4 Wicked Puppet Dance
          5 Anywhere
          6 Tropical Beaches, Inc.
          7 The Mask
          8 I Don't Care If I Burn
          9 Grimace_smoking_weed

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          Cover of Cool World by Chat Pile.

          Chat Pile

          Cool World

          Flenser

            Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, the music of Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has stuck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift—a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems.

            Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile’s signature flavor of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band’s shift to a global thematic focus on Cool World not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their songwriting but also how they dissect the album’s core theme of violence. Melded into the band’s twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the album’s ten tracks.

            Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, Cool World is also the band’s first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg (Uniform) capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge.

            While Chat Pile’s debut album was plenty disturbing with its B-movie-inspired interpretation of a “real American horror story”, what the band depicts on Cool World is unsettling not just from its visceral noise rock onslaught, but from depicting how all sorts of atrocities are pretty much standard parts of modern existence. In film terms, think something like a Criterion arthouse film by way of schlocky grindhouse splatterfest: undeniably gratuitous and thrilling in the moment but leaving a looming dread in the back of one’s mind for how close the horrors depicted mirror reality.

            STAFF COMMENTS

            Barry says: Uncompromising blasts of guitar, paddling kick drum and hardcore bursts, reminiscent of Jane Doe era Converge or Crowpath's Red On Chrome. Impeccable, scathing hardcore.

            TRACK LISTING

            I Am Dog Now
            Shame
            Frownland
            Funny Man
            Camcorder
            Tape
            The New World
            Masc
            Milk Of Human Kindness
            No Way Out

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            Cover of Tenkiller Motion Picture Soundtrack by Chat Pile.

            Chat Pile

            Tenkiller Motion Picture Soundtrack

            Flenser

              Oklahoma’s Chat Pile have had an exciting 2022; they released their album God’s Country, toured the midwest and east coast in support of the album, announced their appearance at Roadburn Festival 2023, and while the band is working on LP2, they’re revealing details for their score for the indie film Tenkiller.

              While not a proper full-length album, the Tenkiller score was written and recorded in the winter of 2020, and it waxes and wanes from the signature Chat Pile sound but also ventures into new ones including arena country music.

              The band comments, “The music we made for Tenkiller is quite a bit different than what you may come to expect from us. We were given the freedom to really experiment and explore territories that we’ve never done before.” They continue, “It’s not going to be for everyone, but we hope some of you connect with what we set out to do.”

              TRACK LISTING

              1. TAH
              2. Badman
              3. Dad’s Drunk
              4. The Fabulous Shitheads
              5. LE
              6. The Return Of Badman
              7. Lake Time (Mr. Rodan)
              8. Kids
              9. QUAH
              10. Badman 3: Die Badman Die
              11. B4dm4n
              12. Punishment Box
              13. Beck’s Theme
              14. OK
              15. Badman V: A New Beginning
              16. Bleeding Out
              17. Tenkiller

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              Cover of Celebrity Mansions by Dinosaur Pile-Up.

              Dinosaur Pile-Up

              Celebrity Mansions

              Parlophone

                Dinosaur Pile-Up return with their fourth album Celebrity Mansions, a collection of songs that sizzle with big melodies, skewered through with raw, intoxicating emotion. To mark the album’s announcement the band have released the incendiary ‘Thrash Metal Cassette’, their most punk rock and in-your-face track to date.

                DPU have long been talked about as one of British music’s most consistently exciting outfits, with singer/guitarist Matt Bigland forging a reputation as one of rock music’s finest songwriters. So having spent the best part of a decade building a fiercely loyal fanbase, and a stellar live reputation, now’s the time to prove it.

                TRACK LISTING

                01. Thrash Metal Cassette
                02. Back Foot
                03. Stupid Heavy Metal Broken Hearted Loser Punk
                04. Celebrity Mansions
                05. Round The Bend
                06. Pouring Gasoline
                07. Black Limousine
                08. K West
                09. Professional Freak
                10. Long Way Down

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                16 Bitch Pile-Up / Mike Shiflet

                Make Like A Fetus And Abort / Extract, Behold

                Ecstatic Peace

                  Ohio has been rampant on the Ecstatic Peace playlists lately with the release of a long player by Leslie Keffer and a forthcoming split LP by Emeralds and Tusco Terror. Like Keffer, who's moved to Nashville (to be closer to Be Your Own Pet), 16 Bitch Pile-Up and Mike Shiflet are both ex-pats of Ohio. 16 Bitch to California and Shiflet to some weird small town in Japan. Mike Shiflet we've known for years as he has produced some of the more interesting tapes and what not of midwestern out-ness from his Gameboy label and from his legendary duo tour with Burning Star Core / C. Spencer Yeh of a few years back. Like the amazing beard he has sported since childhood his music is a free-fall of acoustic wonder. He is also the cat responsible for turning on most of the world to the radical charms of three girls from Ohio wickedly named 16 Bitch Pile-Up. With a name like that you may have expected something just kinda funny but what made itself imminently obvious was that 16 Bitch was really and extremely into producing a wholly personal thrombosis of noise improvisation. Crystallized to the trio of Sarah Bernat, Sarah Cathers and Shannon Walter this trio has become one of the most consistently exciting live experiences of the last five years. These recordings by both artists were done when both were still residents of Ohio and reflect that time and space right before each other's exodus. They are raw and righteous and ready for you to take a bite.

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