Hella


(Copyright © 2006 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )

Hold Your Horse Is (2002), 6.5/10
The Devil Isn't Red (2004), 6/10
Church Gone Wild / Chirpin Hard (2005), 7.5/10
There's No 666 In Outer Space (2007), 6/10
Holy Smokes: Masculine Drugs (2004), 5/10
Nervous Cop (2004), 5/10
Goon Moon: I Got A Brand New Egg Layin' Machine (2005), 5/10
Team Sleep: Team Sleep (2005), 5/10
Holy Smokes: Talk To Your Kids About the Gangs (2006), 5/10
Ladies: They Mean Us (2006), 5/10
Zach Hill and Mick Barr: Shred Earthship (2006), 6/10
Zach Hill: Astrological Straits (2008), 6/10
Hella: Tripper (2011), 6/10
Zach Hill: Face Tat (2010), 5/10
Death Grips: Exmilitary (2011), 7/10
Death Grips: The Money Store (2012), 6.5/10
Death Grips: No Love Deep Web (2012), 5/10
Death Grips: Government Plates (2013), 6/10
Death Grips: Niggas on the Moon (2014), 5/10
Death Grips: Jenny Death (2015), 6.5/10
Death Grips: Bottomless Pit (2016), 5/10
Death Grips: Year of The Snitch (2018), 6/10
ILY's: I've Always Been Good at True Love (2015), 5/10
ILY's: Scum with Boundaries (2016), 6/10
ILY's: Bodyguard (2017), 5/10
Undo K From Hot: G.A.S. Get a Star (2021), 6/10
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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)

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 instrumental mini-album 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 is deliberately chaotic, unfocused and oblique, but always anchored to Hill's apocalyptic drumming if not to Seim's hysterical guitar (less to his keyboards). Mostly these pieces are displays of virtuoso syncopated, agonizing and somewhat hysterical/punkish counterpoint (The Devil Isn't Red, Hello Great Architect Of The Universe, The Mother Could Be You), with the occasionl miniature atonal skit reminiscent of the no-wave Big Time And The Kid (Arto Lindsay's DNA) and the occasional frantic breathless eruption that pushes the envelope (Top Twenty Notes). But we slo enter the realm of electronic and percussive noise with Brown Medal 2003 and Except No Subs and smell traces of vintage prog-rock in the Captain Beefheart-esque bluesy Suistyle (gloriously ended with a digital hardcore sort of coda). The closer, Welcome To The Jungle Baby, is the most "traditional" piece, almost melodic and almost hard-rock.

Hella's double-disc Church Gone Wild/ Chirpin Hard (Suicide Squeeze, 2005), is the sum of two albums, one for each songwriter. This time the duo does not shun vocals. Hill's spectacular and monumental Church Gone Wild, ostensibly a twelve-minute suite, lends a modern facade to two old-fashioned idioms of the rock avantgarde, industrial music and noise-rock. After the sci-fi overture Leaving the Arena of Anthropology, the loud and emphatically gothic I'm Quitting the Cult unravels halfway between Who's rock operas and the Led Zeppelin's hard rock, and then the stormy uncontrolled drumming of Half Hour Handshake propels chaotic vocals. On the other hand, the relatively catchy but still wildly eccentric Imaginary Friends evokes the naive psychedelia of Kevin Ayers and Syd Barrett. Wildlife Takes the Loser by Night opens as a Latin-tapping dance and morphs into a zombie boogie while earsplitting noise and pounding percussion blur the borders between genres. Once you get used to the massive wall of sound (noise?), the vocals get more attention, and almost become a distraction. But ideas such as the ghostly requiem Earth's First Evening Jimi Hendrix-Less and Pissed (with a looped sample of pianola and choir) (and, as usual, totally out of sync drums), the orgiastic square dance Wish I Never Saw a White Man, and the grandiloquent symphonic blues of Baby in a Coma/ Child of No Calendar (rapidly imploding into a rhythmic black hole) are still resplendent examples of a wild imagination at work. Another peak of dissonante comes with the wordless organic nightmare of Bodyguards Harmonic. The closer, We Was Just Boys Living in a Dead Ass German Shepard, is simply a madman banging on anything that he can get hold of, that a brutal guitar riff cannot rescue from a maelstrom of noise and the jazz-metal apocalypse that follows. Every song is wrapped in an industrial-lysergic fog, incapable of running on straight rails, subject to innumerable detours, easily hijacked by rhythms and noises that break all the rules. The intensity is life-threatening.

Seim's Chirpin Hard adds a videogame quality to deconstruct the new wave and prog-rock references. By comparison with the superhuman forces unleashed by Hill's disc, Seim's album is laid-back. Instrumental highlights include the pulsing voodoobilly of Gold Mine Gold Yours with surf-horror overtones (the Fleshtones on steroids); the minimalist tirade of Try Dis; the cubistic space ballet Mind Over Butter; and the closer Chirpin Hard with its few minutes of bouncing booming techno artillery (the rest of the piece is bonus filler). If these were two separate albums, Hill's would rank as one of the decade's masterpieces.

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 heretical revisitations of folk, pop and jazz stereotypes. The vocals, however, are way more "regular" than on previous outings. All the tempo shifts, syncopated rhythms and anarchic guitar noise of World Series, organized so as to emanate post-rock pomp and suspense, coexist with vocals worthy of a Fall-esque pub-rock shouter. There are surprising melody and pathos in Let Your Heavies Out amid the beastly jarring moves a` la Jesus Lizard and Shellac. There's a cubist method at work in flattening curves and creating discontinuities, and Soundtrack To Insecurity is particularly revealing. After a while, all the complicated brainy rhythms and riffs begin to sound similar. One thanks the tragic overtones of The Ungrateful Dead (especially in the second half when the song downsizes to ballad form) and the musichall spirit of Anarchists Just Wanna Have Fun, otherwise half of the songs would be as memorable as carbon copies. The friendlier side of this music leads to an experiment with pop harmonies in Friends Don't Let Friends Win and to the sneering funk-soul shuffle Hands That Rock The Cradle (admittedly the latter is intriguing, but the former is trash). There's No 666 In Outer Space even aims for U2-grade epos. The shining production and the virtuoso playing represent a quantum jump in ambition, but nothing here can match the splendor of Church Gone Wild. Hella's impact is greatly diminished.

Nervous Cop (5 Rue Christine, 2004) was an all-instrumental project with Joanna Newsom and two drummers (Deerhoof's Greg Saunier and Hella's Zach Hill) and some electronics (Deerhoof's John Dieterich). The core of the album are hysterically short bursts of drumming, that only at the end turn into something organic (The Hawk Feeds You to Feed Itself). The longer pieces are the insanely childish Frank vs Frank and the one that is truly worth listening to: Nuflesh Old Thirst, a nightmarish evocation of the nuclear holocaust.

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.

Zach Hill also collaborated with Scott Herren of Prefuse 73 on the Diamond Watch Wrists' Ice Capped at Both Ends (2009).

Bygones are Zach Hill and Tera Melos' guitarist Nick Reinhart. They released By (Sargent House, 2009) and Spiritual Bankruptcy (Sargent House, 2010).

Hella's Tripper (2011), with the original duo of Spencer Seim and Zach Hill on guitar and drums, boasted the frantic Headless and the solemn Yubacore, but none of the ten pieces were long enough to justify their recklessly irregular structure.

Sam Coomes of Quasi and Spencer Seim of Hella formed Crock that debuted with Grok (Jackpot, 2011), mostly devoted to very noisy psych-pop deformities such as No More Dumb Fun and Nutritional Beast but also indulged in violent/hypnotic trips like the litany propelled by frenzied blast-beats of Eat Your Hat Out.

The trio of vocalist Stefan Burnett, drummer Zach Hill and keyboardist Andy Morin formed the hip-hop group Death Grips that debuted with the confrontational rants of Exmilitary (Third Worlds, 2011), the first album in a long time to resurrect the spectre of Tackhead. The emphatic choral declamation of Beware sets the tone with loud guitar and fast beats, but the original style of the trio is better demonstrated in Guillotine, a far less assured rap that rapidly disintegrates in a molass of electronic pulses; whereas vocal counterpoint and galloping beats intone the playful and exuberant sarabande of Lord Of The Game.
The register of the voice changes all the time, and so the accompaniment. Takyon (Death Yon) borrows the tragic overtones of gangsta-rap with loud thundering bass and martial rapping. Abandoning for a few minutes the preacher's tone, they switch to a conversational tone for Culture Shock and match it with a jam of twitching robotic music. In another burst of punkish brutality, they stage the dancehall mayhem of Thru The Walls. Still breathless from that mindless run, one second later they are grafting a prog-rock organ refrain on the litany of Known For It. And they close with the frenzied chaotic rap and drumming of Blood Creepin , almost a gothic tribal dance.
A subtle and erudite undercurrent of post-modernist reappropriations of vintage rock music pulls the project apart in all sorts of directions. Spread Eagle Cross The Block ups the ante with its deconstruction of vintage quasi-surf guitar twangs and reverbs (Link Wray's classic Rumble) at a vintage spy-thriller pace (and the vocal line sounds like an angrier remix of Bob Dylan's Rolling Stone). Klink shouts and howls against a wall of shrapnel beats but ends cryptically with a sample of the organ riff of a garage-rock hit of the 1960s (the Castaways' Liar Liar). A monotonous skinny beat lays the foundation for I Want It I Need It (Death Heated) but the real fuel comes from strategic samples of the guitar riff from Pink Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive. It is telling that only Culture Shock (and to some extent Thru The Walls) delivers the same powerful punch as these trio of glorious revisitations.
This music cover a broad range of styles and each song succeeds in its own niche.

Death Grips improved the sound quality but lessened the emotional impact on The Money Store (Epic, 2012). The fizzling electronics Get Got is a good metaphor for the average song on this album: great ideas, impeccable implementation, but a cold impersonal attitude that rarely strikes a chord. Blackjack is the notable exception, a powerful rhythmic progression and verbal assault. I've Seen Footage, that sounds like a remix of Salt-N-Pepa's Push It with a memorable guitar riff, offers the catchiest moment. Then there is the rigmarole and pow-wow dance of System Blower, and there is the pounding, fibrillating industrial-grade Hacker ; but it all sounds more facile and compromising. And, of course, there is the one moment of folly, the beginning of Punk Weight, something like a Middle-eastern remix of an Aqua hit played at double speed. This album is far more conventional than the first Death Grips album. It has also more melody.

Hill took a long time to give Astrological Straits a follow-up: Face Tat (2010) sounds like a notebook, a hodgepodge of unrelated ideas, rather than a coherent narrative. The songs run the gamut from the catchy The Primitives Talk to some musique-concrete collages. The peak of intensity is The Sacto Smile, a collaboration with No Age's Dean Spunt and Randy Randall and Tera Melos' guitarist Nick Reinhart.

Death Grips' lame No Love Deep Web (2012) continued the artistic decline of the project.

Death Grips were now Zach Hill's main occupation. Government Plates (2013) boasts the nuclear bass detonations of You Might Think He Loves You For Your Money and the mind-bending distortions of I'm Overflow, but the real project lies in the pieces that downplay the rapping: in the cubistic intermezzo This Is Violence Now, a manic collage of vocal samples and robotic beats; in the surreal psychedelic intermezzo Birds; in the abstract sonic vortex of Feels Like A Wheel; and in the breathtaking minimalist repetition of Whatever I Want. It feels like a transitional work, rehashing what they do for a living while timidly rehearsing new ideas for the future.

The Powers That B consists of two albums that highlight both the strengths and weaknesses of Death Grips: Niggas on the Moon (Harvest, 2014) and Jenny Death (Third Worlds, 2015). The former, a rather uninspired and short effort, restores the rap to the forefront. The music is a lot less inventive, and certainly not breathtaking. The relatively lightweight and humorous Billy Not Really stands out, and the cubistic madness of the previous album resurfaces in Have a Sad Cum. Jenny Death, a delirious return to form, begins with the hyper-active I Break Mirrors with My Face in the United States, later outclassed by the dynamite frenzy of Turned Off. Then it delves into the claustrophobic atmosphere of Inanimate Sensation, quickly dwarfed by the violent expressionist nightmare of Why a Bitch Gotta Lie if not by the disturbing audio and vocal psychology of PSS PSS. Then suddenly the album shifts gear with the rocking metal-machine music of Beyond Alive and the oddly waltzing On GP, that hark back to industrial rock a` la Ministry of the 1990s and to Neil Young's electric jams. The instrumental closer Death Grips 2.0 cements the dystopian feeling of the album.

Bottomless Pit (Third World, 2016) is another step by Death Grips towards a friendlier sound, like The Money Store was, with shorter songs and a mellower sound. The virulent but also hystrionic opener, Giving Bad People Good Ideas, with backing female vocals, sounds like a musichall version of Ministry. At best Ring A Bell packs the nuclear energy of Tackhead, and closer Bottomless Pit is an infernal rockabilly that evokes Atari Teenage Riot's "digital hardcore", but songs such as Hot Head (the single) sound hysterical for the sake of being hysterical, and often the chaos ends up sounding clownish, for example in Spikes. The intricate beatscapes of Bubbles Buried In This Jungle and Three Bedrooms In A Good Neighborhood are certainly displays of studio dexterity, but the most atmospheric rap is Trash, which is a humbler song, with subdued (Caribbean) beats and wrapped in a shroud of electronica.

Death Grips assembled a 22-minute piece on the EP Steroids (2017) that sounds like sequence of different songs. After two minutes the rhythm explodes into a sophisticated beatscape. At about four minutes, the already excited MC engages in an hyperkinetic rap. At about six minutes the piece indulges in mechanical repetition. At about eight minutes the rap blends with a delirious rockabilly. At 11:30 a pompous synth hijacks the brutal sound for a fanfare and Frank Zappa-esque humor. After 14 minutes the drummer unleashes a polyrhytmic tempest with the cooperation of a metal-like synth amid a deluge of industrial shrapnels. By the time we reach the 19:30 minute, the piece has become a collage of musique concrete and alien videogames.

That was the appetizer for the album Year of The Snitch (Third Worlds, 2018). Death Grips tried to restore their reputation after the mess of Bottomless Pit with the techno-metal-rap Death Grips Is Online and especially the booming voodoobilly Black Paint (like a collaboration between the Cramps and Rage Against The Machine). They certainly succeed in the brief digital-hardcore eruption of Shitshow, perhaps their most brutal song of the decade, and in the emphatic and epileptic closer, Disappointed. Dilemma is the most innovative song here, a hybrid of prog-rock and punk-rock (with echoes of both early Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols) for a rap shouted in a demonic voice. There are still some "comic" overtones in the musichall skit Linda's in Custody and especially in the mock-heroic, symphonic Hahaha. Even the electronic counterpoint to the rap in Streaky is something that Frank Zappa could have done. Much is still confused, chaotic, incoherent.

Zach Hill and Andy Morin also launched a Death Grips side project, the I.L.Y.'s, with the brief album I've Always Been Good at True Love (2015). The project matured on Scum with Boundaries (2016), a sort of tribute to the frenzied noise-rock of the 1990s, but fell apart on Bodyguard (2017), an odd appropriation of catchy garage-rock.

Death Grips returned with the childish 28-minute collage of the EP Gmail and the Restraining Orders (2019). Volthree Digital (2020) was another collaboration between Zach Hill and Mick Barr.

Zach Hill, Tera Melos' singer Nick Reinhart and The Advantage's guitarist Robby Moncrief formed Undo K From Hot that debuted with the album G.A.S. Get a Star (2021), followed by the singles Dumb Little Fucker (2021) and Remnants of Chris (2022). The album feels like combining an EP which is quite homogeneous (the first four songs) and then a set of random songs in different styles. The first songs are loud and unrelenting: Ziplock Quilts That Kill From Hot unleashes gusts of stormy electronic noise-rock and furious shouting, something like Napalm Death crossed with Jesus Lizard; 750 Dispel is spastic distorted dismembered industrial-rock; and Incomplete Spanks basically amounts to anti-rap buried in radioactive supernova waves. The other side of the album is very different, and not as cohesive. The danceable singalong Back Pages borrows from Atari Teenage Riot's digital hardcore, Missing Information is a strange hybrid of drum'n'bass and sped-up Scooter-esque techno, and rough closer Crosswalk harkens back to industrial dance of the 1980s.

(Copyright © 2006 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
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