Rick Maguire, frontman of Pile, sits opposite me in the basement of The Avenue, chewing ice cubes between sips of beer and trying to remember how many times the band has played Great Scott.
The room has abruptly become too loud, and it’s getting distracting. Top 40 hits blare from a nearby speaker and echo off the wood paneling, the Pats game is on three TVs within a ten-foot radius, and a new crowd of noisy spectators is pouring down the stairs to add to the din. It’s not the most Pile atmosphere ever. He’s still racking his brain to come up with a number.
We’re practically across the street from the venue itself, where the band’s set to play a residency over the course of three consecutive Thursdays in December. Maguire’s having trouble estimating the number of shows because Great Scott has become the band’s main stomping ground at home in Boston, and at this point it’s probably like trying to remember how many times he’s walked down his own street. Eventually he ballparks it as “between 30 and 50”, but even seems hesitant to commit to that. He’s modest: “We’ve been lucky enough to have people come out to see us there a decent amount.” More accurately, Pile regularly sells the club to capacity. The nights start to blend together at this point.
I’ve seen Pile too many times in the past year, and I’ve still barely seen them enough. They specialize in dense, gnarled guitar compositions and volatile dynamic arrangements that reveal more complexity with every listen, and that doesn’t even begin to cover the technical intricacy of their live shows. Pile’s sound isn’t as genre-defying as it is genre-engulfing, gnashing down on everything from blues riffs to hardcore ferocity, tossing it all around in stomach acid for a few minutes and spitting back an artfully mutilated version of whatever you once thought rock music was supposed to be.
But watch Maguire perform solo, singing with an acoustic guitar (always humbly billed as “Rick from Pile”, as if no one knows who Rick Maguire is) and you’ll witness something equally intense. Pummeling distorted progressions translate into stripped-down acoustic numbers without losing any of their character, because his obscure, metaphor-laced songwriting and melodic heaviness are at the core of the band.
Pile is a foursome made up of Maguire, guitarist Matt Becker, bassist Matt Connery, and drummer Kris Kuss. The band started as Maguire’s solo side project while writing and performing with a previous group, Hel Toro, and was intended as a catch-all for the “pile” of songs that didn’t fit that band’s style. When Hel Toro came to an end (and after some initial lineup juggling) Pile transitioned into a full band and took on Boston’s DIY circuit.
Watching and later participating in those shows shifted Maguire’s perspective on what it meant to be a part of the local scene. As the band became more popular, it presented new challenges: namely, the struggle of playing shows at thriving, not-exactly-legal house venues that were constantly pitted against local law enforcement. As Pile’s following grew and its set times were billed later in the night, it also experienced the unfortunate Allston band rite of passage that is getting busted by police in the middle of house show sets—more than a dozen times, as Maguire recalls.
Dan Goldin, then a local music blogger and soon-to-be founder of indie label Exploding in Sound Records, was among those showgoers back in the house venue heyday. He recalls first seeing Pile at Wadzilla Mansion, one of many now-defunct venues of Allston’s infamous GAP (Gardener-Ashford-Pratt) neighborhood, and thinking to himself “this could be the greatest band I’ve ever seen.” He emails me that it’s “hard to write about Pile without sounding like a goon or a fanboy,” but if anyone can justify a little Pile worship, it’s him. Shortly after Goldin first saw them live, the band became instrumental in Exploding in Sound’s transition from music blog to full-blown record label.
“Pile was the very first band to join the label. Essentially, the day we agreed to do it together was the day EIS began. It became very apparent to me back then that Magic Isn’t Real was far and away my favorite album I was listening to at the time, and not just of the many great local bands, but of anything that was being released. The time to start the label around a band like Pile, a band that works so hard and you can truly believe in, just seemed right. I couldn’t do this without them and wouldn’t want to… [Rick] can get a room full of people to sing songs about taking a poop and no one thinks anything of it,” he explains. “They represent Boston and the working class musician with some serious grace. Pile are professional as hell, and yet they do things on their own terms and can still drink more than any other band I know. Boston appreciates stuff like that. It’s like watching a shooting star, you know you’re seeing something special.”
Goldin isn’t the only one who thinks that way. As Exploding in Sound has grown from a small community label to a more established name, Pile has remained a mainstay and developed a reputation as the band that other bands get obsessed with.
Sadie Dupuis, frontwoman of early days-labelmate Speedy Ortiz, describes finding inspiration in the band’s songwriting and its performance chemistry. “They’ve been playing together for so long that it’s like one body with different organ systems all working in sync. They’re just so good at reading each other when they’re playing live and interpreting the songs that Rick writes… Pile’s a band we’ve always felt a pretty close kinship to musically, so I’m sure there’s plenty of times we’ve ripped them off.”
Carl Shane of Kal Marks, a fellow Exploding in Sound band that shares Pile’s practice space, echoes a similar idea. He’s familiar with the buzz surrounding the band, but works closely enough with them to demystify it. “A lot of care and love is put into their music, and it shows every time. People always ask me the secret to why they are so good. It’s not fucking rocket science. If you have some kind of vision and dedication, and you work with three other awesome individuals, you can make something great. They strive for that every time.”
There seem to be two lines of thinking about Pile: one camp that insists it’s all about catharsis, going apeshit against the monitors when “Grunt Like a Pig” starts up, and another that uses that raw emotion as a jumping-off point for intellectualizing lyrics to smithereens, like a lit class with a disproportionate focus on graphic anatomical metaphors. Belief in the former is what gives the shows their energy; it’s what awards bruises, bloodies noses, and makes being in the middle of that crowd’s crush both harrowing and addicting. Belief in the latter spurs internet chatter and dissection, resulting in thinkpiece-y features that attempt to win readers over on suspected nuances, like the 3,000-word Impose deconstruction of the 300 words of “Special Snowflakes”. Taken together, the two create another dimension of the band that has little to do with its members or music, raising them to an odd tier of music-geek mythology.