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Inside: Cultural Sausage. ~ Ludic Lists. ~ Skullbucket. Outside: "WONDER WOMAN CATFIGHTS" "teeth plaque conspiracy Metallica" "pee on me" "living in a big city" "Thriller Robert Loren Fleming" "free XM radio" "pictures of She-Hulk naked" "monologues for black women" |
06.11.2004
Saw Hella again tonight, again at the Bottom Lounge, same place I saw them last year, which was also the first time I saw them. Odd that they play at the Bottom Lounge; little linguistic ironies pop up. Aside from the name, the Bottom Lounge is host to a lot of rap acts; Hella is free of vocals and has no bottom to their sound aside from the spasmodic thud of Zach Hill's kick drum. But it's a good venue for them, not so small that their incredible sound totally overwhelms you but small enough that you can get right up close to them and feel their incredible energy. For those of you who aren't aware, Hella is an instrumental two-piece (guitar and drums) from Sacramento, CA. Their performance last year at the Bottom was so amazing that I knew in an instant that it was the best live show I'd seen all year, and probably one of the best live shows I'd ever see in my entire life. Their sound is extremely difficult to describe; although they use rock instrumentation and vaguely rockish structures, they aren't anything like most rock bands you'll ever hear. Their use of beeps and whistles on their records lead some critics to peg them as mutated techno, but this loses what little relevance it has when you see them play live, without electronics of any kind and with barely any effects even on the guitar. The fact that they play a lot of improvised music, are entirely instrumental, and have a tremendous degree of virtuosity invited comparisons to free jazz, but there's no "blues feeling" and their chordal improvising isn't like what you hear in any jazz this side of Keiji Haino. It's hard even to call them post-rock, as that generally carries a connotation of meditative, open grooving that ill suits their herky-jerky, ultra-dynamic performance. But, in the words of a real jazzman, I'll play it first and tell you what it is later. One comparison that never gets made with Hella is to metal, but even that has its place: the frenetic, impossibly fast and powerful musicianship of drummer Zach Hill and the jaw-dropping fingerwork of guitarist Spencer Seim is rarely seen outside the rarefied worlds of grindcore, speed and black metal. Of course, their music is nothing like that of the corpsepaint brigade, but there's a hundred metal drummers who'd give anything to have Hill's velocity or Seim's chops. The two of them are literally exhausting to watch: they play in a seeming contradiction, impossibly tight and synched-up while seeming super-loose and chaotic at the same time. Both are frail, remarkably fit men, no doubt kept in shape by the unquestionably physically demanding act of playing the way they do; and both have slight hunches in their shoulders and will probably be physical wrecks by the time they're forty from giving it their all with such stunning power and skill night after night. Hill is almost painful to see play; his arms flash and flail in such a blur of speed that he resembles an animated cartoon of someone drumming. And Seim has one of the most alarming cases of guitar face I've ever seen; in anyone else it would be either laughable or unforgivable, but the other-dimensional skill with which he plays seems to demand such facial contortions. They showcased the power, skill and lighting speed that I saw from them last time out, but they clearly haven't lay fallow the previous 12 months; not content to play in the same exact way, they appear to be playing a lot more with space and with the start-stop dynamic than in their previous show. It's not that they were lacking in ferocity or ability or even their trademark turn-your-bones-to-jelly speed; it's that they were feeling each other out, improvising a bit more, introducing silences, delays, breakneck shifts in tone. It's alarming to think, given how good they already are, that they might be getting better musically, but scattered throughout this pulverizing performance was plenty of evidence that such a thing is indeed taking place. Before Hella went on, the opening band -- a Chicago outfit of whom I'd never heard -- got about two thirds of the way through their first number when the singer, who was flailing around and whirling his mic stand like a cut-rate Roger Daltrey, clocked the bass player right in the eye. It was horrifying and fascinating: he didn't get up, or even move, for nearly a half an hour, and all of us in the audience spared a brief moment to wonder if we hadn't just seen a guy killed on stage. But let me tell you this: even if the guy had died, that still wouldn't have upstaged Hella. |
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| TODAY'S DRIFTWOOD: "To ask the meaning of art is like asking the meaning of life:? experience comes before a measurement against a value system." (Fairfield Porter) |