Adolescence is a time of trying on identities, of figuring out what kind of person you want to be through trial & error. For teenage music nerds, there a few forks in the road where you figure out exactly what kind of adult music nerd you want to be. When my buddy Leo introduced me to Hella in 11th grade, I found myself at one of those forks: I was going to try the identity of Incredibly Strange Music lover on for size.
For those of you who don't know, Incredibly Strange Music lovers delight in seeking out the oddest, most outré, avant-garde, outsider musical offerings in existence. It should not be assumed that this kind of music nerd values bizarreness over enjoyment; it is the very degree of bizarreness that determines their enjoyment. Although I like plenty of music that might be considered freaky & challenging by the hoi palloi (e.g. late Coltrane, grindcore, etc.), I never really went down that road. If I had, Hold Your Horse Is would have been the first step. As it stands, Hella is a delightful little detour that I don't regret taking.
Finding out about Hella from Leo in the cafeteria hallway next to the pillars at lunch was like being whispered a coded message by a co-conspirator. The fact that I could walk into Tower Records & purchase this...thing...somehow made it feel even more surreal. When I popped it in, after the glitchy 43-second electronic intro, I was greeted with a blast of guitar & drum grandstanding that didn't let up for the album's 33 remaining minutes. At this stage, Hella was an instrumental duo--just a guitarist & a drummer. The guitarist, Spencer Seim, plays lots of circular fingerpicking figures on angular chords, sweetened by frequent slides & tremolo picking. His trebly tone, with just a touch of crunch, accentuates the absence of a bassist. The drummer, Zach Hill, is fond of tom rolls but punctuates everything with plenty of snare, making judicious use of his cymbals. As a teenage drummer, I was first & foremost fascinated by the drum work here. (Zach Hill went on to drum & co-produce for the much better-known Death Grips.) Sometimes the guitar slows down, but the drums are never less than furious. The best adjective to describe this music is churning. There is a loopy circularity to it, as if both musicians are grinding their instruments to dust with a mortar & pestle. It's admirable that they can maintain this feeling despite a mathrock-esque commitment to inconsistent time signatures. Every once in a while, a groove will scrape itself out in a friendly meter, like the last minute of "Been a Long Time Cousin," but these are eyes of the storm & the hurricane quickly takes back over.
Among my little high school crew that worshiped this album, the highlight was "1-800-Ghost-Dance," with its half-time drum groove & lyrical hammer-ons that dissolve into & out of skronky free-jazz insanity. In retrospect, the standout track is "Brown Metal," if only for its distinctiveness compared to the other songs. The drum production is murkier, there's less snare & more cymbals, some electronics (or at least heavily processed guitar) sneak in, & the 2nd half is ironically the most conventional rock & roll section on the whole album--if you can look past the gradual ritardando that grinds everything to a halt.
Hold Your Horse Is is a great album. I had a lot of fun listening to it today, & it triggered some buried feelings & images from my high school years. The fact that it didn't propel me into a lifetime of seeking out Incredibly Strange Music says more about me than it does about the album. I know I could start introducing more Incredibly Strange Music into my regular listening--who knows, maybe I will--but it will never be the same as if I'd chosen that fork in the road back in high school. "Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back."
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