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Hella was originally the Sacramento-based duo of guitarist Spencer Seim and drummer Zach Hill.
The spastic instrumental post-rock of Hold Your Horse Is (2002)
harked back to Slint and
Don Caballero,
but also to Polvo's jovial alt-pop.
The EP Bitches Ain't Shit But Good People (2003) and the
mini-album Total Bugs Bunny On Wild Bass (2003), with a prominent (and old-fashioned) synthesizer, dangerously increased the instability of the formula.
The Devil Isn't Red (2004) refined the art of mutation within a song,
in a game of perennial unfocused and shifting identities. The music was
deliberately chaotic, unfocused and oblique, but always anchored to
Hill's apocalyptic drumming if not to Seim's hysterical guitar (less to his
keyboards).
Their third album, the double-disc
Church Gone Wild / Chirpin Hard (Suicide Squeeze, 2005), consisted of
two CDs, one for each "songwriter".
Hill's Church Gone Wild lends a
modern facade to two old-fashioned idioms of the rock avantgarde,
industrial music and noise-rock.
Seim's Chirpin Hard adds a videogame quality to deconstruct the new wave
and prog-rock.
Tracks:
Church Gone Wild
1. "Leaving the Arena of Anthropology: Movement 1" - 1:14
2. "I'm Quitting the Cult: Movement 2" - 5:14
3. "Half Hour Handshake: Movement 3"- 5:56
4. "Imaginary Friends: Movement 4" - 5:48
5. "Wildlife Takes the Loser by Night: Movement 5" - 5:37
6. "Black Metal Blues/Black Mold: Movement 6" - 4:11
7. "Nixed: Movement 7" - 3:08
8. "Earth's First Evening Jimi Hendrix-Less and Pissed: Movement 8" - 6:07
9. "Wish I Never Saw a White Man: Movement 9" - 5:32
10. "Baby in a Coma/Child of No Calendar: Movement 10" - 5:44
11. "Bodyguards Harmonic: Movement 11" - 4:02
12. "We Was Just Boys, Living in a Dead Ass German Shepard: Movement 12" - 6:31
Chirpin' Hard
1. "Gold Mine, Gold Yours" - 2:28
2. "Song from Uncle" - 3:41
3. "W" - 2:12
4. "Try Dis..." - 3:21
5. "Drop Diva" - 1:25
6. "Famnail" - 2:19
7. "Dad for Song" - 3:06
8. "Mind Over Butter" - 2:13
9. "Home on the Arrange" - 4:17
10. "Trap Kit Whatever" - 1:39
11. "Proud of the Sun" - 1:38
12. "Chirpin Hard" - 17:40
Concentration Face & Homeboy (5 Rue Christine, 2005) is an EP plus a DVD.
Hella's There's No 666 In Outer Space (Ipecac, 2007)
presented a real band, fronted by vocalist Aaron Ross and careening through
sloppy revisitations of folk, pop and jazz stereotypes.
Nervous Cop (2003) was a project by Joanna Newsom, Deerhoof's drummer Greg Saunier and Hella's drummer Zach Hill Deerhoof's keyboardist John Dieterich.
Zach Hill also played on Lead Singer (2004) by Flossin, a trio with Chris Willits and Kid 606.
A trio led by Zach Hill recorded two albums under different names: Tough Guy Fantasy's hellish Thank Gods It's Friday and and the Arctic Boys' meditative Louisiana Purchase.
Zach Hill's the Holy Smokes, featuring Rob Crow, released Masculine Drugs (2004) and Talk To Your Kids About the Gangs (2006). The Ladies was a collaboration with Rob Crow that released They Mean Us (Temporary Residence, 2006). These were Hill's less experimental works yet.
Goon Moon was a group formed by Hella's Zach Hill, Marilyn Manson's guitarist Twiggy Ramirez and Masters Of Reality's Chris Goss that debuted with I Got A Brand New Egg Layin' Machine (Suicide Squeeze, 2005), a relatively straightforward rock album by Hill's standards.
Team Sleep, a supergroup of sorts fronted by the Deftones' vocalist Chino Moreno with Hella's Zach Hill on drums and Tom Wilkinson on guitar, plus several guests, applied post-rock to trip-hop Team Sleep (2005)
Shred Earthship (2006) was a collaboration between Zach Hill and
Orthrelm's bassist Mick Barr: 19 spastic atonal-jazz twitches.
Zach Hill also played on
Marnie Stern's first albums.
Zach Hill debuted solo with
Astrological Straits (2008), a
polyrhythmic drumming tour de force
that often
sounded like Hella with a lot of keyboards, and basically alternated between
quirky pop songs (Dark Art) and prog-rock suites
(Astrological Straits).
To the avalanche of beats add a passion for arranging with all sorts of
sound effects.
Hill doesn't seem to know what he really wants to play, and probably because
he plays everything quite well. The whole, alas, is confused, to say the least.
The accompanying disc contains a
33-minute duet with jazz pianist Marco Benevento,
Necromancer.
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