Live music review: Chat Pile played like demolition crew at Radio East
Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile named themselves after the gray hills of mine tailings that still sit over northeast Oklahoma. The Picher field supplied more than half the lead and zinc used in World War I, and the waste, called chat, was left in the open for decades. Families picnicked on it. Kids sledded down it. Nobody tied the piles to the lead in those kids’ blood until much later, and by then Picher was on its way to becoming a ghost town. The OKC quartet sounds like that debt being collected. At Radio/East on a Thursday night, they played like demolition crew, and Austin, a city that has always made room for bands willing to inflict pain, took every hit. Who Loves the Sun is the latest in a catalog that keeps getting heavier and angrier, and nothing about this set suggested they plan to let up.
Radio/East sits far enough out in Southeast Austin that the volume can go where it needs to. It also runs as a coffee shop, so the non-drinkers and anyone with work Friday morning had options.
Lawrence, Kansas band Virga opened. They call their sound gothic Americana, and their set was a study in tension and release: grunge-leaning verses that wound tight, then broke open in the choruses.
Philadelphia’s Soul Glo came next, with new songs and the same rage. Austin knows them well by now, and anyone who caught them at Mohawk in the pouring rain with Mannequin Pussy a few years back knows what they’re capable of. Their politics about the current state of the world haven’t softened either.
Chat Pile hadn’t played Austin in a year, which is a long gap for a band that has filled the city’s best rooms since the project started. They pull from sludge, noise rock, nu metal, and shoegaze, and somehow it all lands as one sound that works for every kind of weirdo in the room. Frontman Raygun Busch has the gift of gab, and in Austin he plays the movie nerd, name-checking films shot in and around town. The diehards who show up every time they come through screamed every word back, loud enough to compete with the PA.
New songs “Creature” and “PEN I S MALL” opened the set, followed closely by Cool World favorite “I Am Dog Now.” Busch stopped to address the state of Texas politics and suggested Governor Greg Abbott be “pushed down the stairs.” “Slaughterhouse,” the opener from 2022’s God’s Country, got a huge reaction. That record built the fanbase now packing these rooms.
The band also leaned into its Arby’s devotion with “Rainbow Meat,” from the 2019 debut EP This Dungeon Earth. A few fans showed up in homemade Arby’s merch for the occasion, and the band was glad to oblige.
“Dallas Beltway” closed the main set. It’s an early cut and still the best entry point into a sound the band sharpens with every release. “Why” was the only encore: a singalong about the unhoused that hits as hard now as it did when it came out as a single ahead of God’s Country. These sets always leave you wanting more, and hopefully it won’t be too long before the Chat Pile players return.
Chat Pile’s Who Loves the Sun tour continues through the Fall. Dates and tickets are on the band’s website.
All photos by Justin Clark except where noted
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