Thing of the Day
Hella! - new album Tripper arrives early
August
24th 2011
It
just strolls in, fires up, blows everything else away. Here's
the new album from Sacramento avant-progressive duo Hella, delivered
early, dropping into many hungry open eager ears.
Nothing disappoints. Ok, it is, on first listen, a string of
similar-but-different peices, an overwhelming, disorienting blur of
fascinating noise. Initially similar in terms of intensity, volume and
welly; very Spencer Seim-driven, and today guitarist Spencer is in a
beefy, heavy, metal/progressive mood. Like a way more refined
Fucking Champs or Orthrelm: Zach
Hill and Spencer
Seim are back to examining the pure beauty of riffage, the
different angles and patterns you can make with the metal guitar/drum
framework combination.
Zach Hill is, of course, one of the most distinctive (the most distinctive?) and certainly expressive drummers in the world; he and Seim have been crafting these ditties together as a duo since 2001-ish, and they were spooky back then, so imagine what this telepathic two are like now. Could this super-complex seamlessness be any tighter (and yet, as true musicians, not musos, close enough to each other's firing neurons to be able to stretch time, push the pulse back and forth)?
Of course, the shifting and changing of time signatures and chunking of melodies and motifs make this your classic example of math rock, but these guys were doing this before the phrase became easy to say without laughing; before it became a style to feel obliged to aspire to. Hella were and are beyond all that. The rhythmic complexity is second nature, just the colours they paint with.
The
bulk of Tripper
is Hella in classic heavy mode, with Self Checkout and Long Hair big on
the joy of driving metal riffage, Spencer getting even more Houses Of The Holy
than usual by the end of the latter, and Netgear starting
off the same then unexpectedly falling off the world and setting the
controls for the heart of the sun. Kid
Life Crisis snaps out of the mould with an Upsilon
Acrux-style fake CD chopglitch start, rolling into really nice, proggy
big tune riffs a la Song
From Uncle - a satisfying track. On The Record is
just letting rip and going headlong. Headless and Yubacore are
standout tracks in terms of clear-cut guitar and tunes. Furthest adds a
little bit of a bluesier sound to the stew (albeit a nicely awkward,
twisty kind of blues that flies off into another universe unexpectedly)
and then Zach gets to go full-on turbo on the no-holds-barred Psycho Bro.
Final track Osaka
has a dark and stormy flavour to the interveaved melodies that fades
out on a great, uncharacteristically toned-down, loping guitar spiral
that leaves you wanting more.
So Tripper
is full-on, unadulterated Hella, back to the duo instrumental intensity
after the interesting (but relatively 'normal') excursion of the
five-piece and There's
No 666 In Outer Space. It's maybe missing their
(even) more experimental flavours, but Tripper is huge on
sheer energy and exhuberance - no-messing Hella: dense, vibrant,
sometimes hard to digest, sometimes jaw-dropping, slightly magical
under the hood.
Tripper is out now on Sargent House sargenthouse.com
Download Tripper here: hella.bandcamp.com/album/tripper - (two sample tracks are free/name your price)
Must-see video for opening track 'Headless'
