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.