Chat Pile’s song Why opens with a question so guileless you could imagine a five-year-old posing it. “Why do people have to live outside,” asks frontman Raygun Busch (not his real name, as you might have guessed) plaintively, “in the brutal heat or when it’s below freezing?” The biggest clue that this isn’t an episode of Sesame Street comes from the chaos swirling around his words: churning guitars; brutal, detuned bass; relentless, clattering drums.
Undeterred by that maelstrom, Busch continues with the questions, his voice getting louder and more forceful: “Why do people have to live outside, when there are buildings all around us with heat on and no one inside?” As the central, doomy riff rears its ugly head for the song’s chorus, Busch loses his inhibitions entirely, furiously screaming “Why?” over and over again. “Horror story, real American horror story”, he growls at the song’s climax, a sample of a tornado warning siren ringing away ominously behind him. The protest song is alive and well, and it’s taken the unlikely form of a sludge metal track.
