Hella - There's No 666 In Outer Space (Ipecac)

by Ari Abramowitz
27 January 2007

What blew everyone’s minds about pioneering power trios such as CREAM and the JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE was how good the musicians had to be in order to maintain the drive of their intense jams and fill up the space formerly held down by larger line-ups. So, imagine what kind of demands were placed on power duos as they started to really emerge over two decades later (with apologies to the SILVER APPLES). Newer school power duos, such as the RUINS, generally had to be spectacularly proficient musicians in order to keep things interesting within such a limited setting. (A notable exception here is the influential doom-drone group EARTH, who were making textured soundscapes more than “songs.” The industrial grind doom band, GODFLESH, while officially a duo, was really a trio, but with a drum machine rather than a live drummer.)

One problem was that very few bands could match the Ruins’ technical and compositional expertise. As a result, since they couldn’t beat ‘em, most duos opted for alternate strategies by being either as noisy as possible or bringing in massive doses of performance art to cover up or overcompensate for a lower-than-optimal level of musical value. But even for duos with good chops, and a willingness to use them in demanding ways, an album is lot of time to fill and the urge to fill some of that time by goofing off could prove too great to resist. The resulting compositions would then tend towards messy, manic, frantic, spastic, unfocused, and clattery. HELLA was one of these latter bands.

It also didn’t help that Hella was a duo of drums and guitar, as opposed to the drums-bass line-up of Ruins or the guitar-bass line-up of Earth. Without much low-end grounding and meatiness, Hella’s noisy tendencies tended to be compounded by being thin and trebly, resulting in an occasionally brilliant but more often irritating sound. This is no longer the case. Perhaps realizing the creative limitations of their duo body, Hella has metamorphosed into a “full rock band” with twin guitars, bass, drums, and…vocals! Drummer Zach Hill, says their new album, There’s No 666 In Outer Space, is “easily the best thing we’ve done.” And he’s right.

Taken as a whole, 666 is a hard, indie, post-rock, prog rock album with much of the rock put back in. If DON CABALLERO got a vocalist or if the F***ING CHAMPS turned down some of the metal and got more into Star Trek we’d be getting in the same solar system. It’s complex, intricate, guitar-based rock music with roots in 1970s prog and hard rock, post-punk, post-rock, and math rock that’s just loose and off-center enough to keep it clearly on the indie side of the fence. Going further, 666 could be looked at as a great example of something becoming clearer, rather than more chaotic, as it gets more complex. Think of how much better you sometimes function when you have a hundred things to do in a day, rather than two. You have no time to kill, so you get focused and knock out all the tasks. In the latter situation, you have so much rope that you hang yourself with it and don’t even do the two measly things that you were going to do. In a similar way, Hella now has so many more parts to coordinate that there’s little room for screwing around.

Since there are two guitars now, rather than one, they can intertwine, rather than be limited to skreefully riffing and chording. Since there is a bass now, it can both add complexity by braiding with the guitar lines as well as fatten the overall sound so that the impact can hit your gut rather than just scatch your eardrums. You can hear more clearly than ever that these guys know what they’re doing and what they’re doing is highly sophisticated. Zach Hill’s vaunted drumming is more focused than ever, as well. While still a bit fluttery, he has accepted the discipline of the songs and plays within them. His resulting playing is less masturbatory and more musical than it’s ever been. All of this is made very clear by the sharpest, tightest production that Hella’s had yet.

And what about the vocalist? His tone is high and a bit robotic with occasional classic rock flares, like a post-punker who dug Robert Plant while growing up. He sounds kinda similar to Dusty Sparkles of DANAVA. But that’s not what’s important. Nor is it important whether he functions as “another instrument.” There are already three melodic voices in the guitars and bass; a fourth is unnecessary. This vocalist is important because he’s a place-holder. That is, his presence signals to everyone listening—and to everyone in the band—that actual songs are being performed. No, the songs are not as memorable as YES’ and yes, they could use some wider range and dynamics, but let’s not focus on space dust rather than on the grander rings that they comprise.

The shift that the vocalist forces is essential to launching Hella to the next level. His presence means everyone else has to step back just a little and leave some space open. With some space open, everyone has the room to craft their parts as finely as subtly as possible, without having to worry about getting stepped on or steamrollered by someone else. By the same token, with so many voices in the mix, the players are forced to rely more on their calligraphy pens than on childishly dumped buckets of ink. Think light sabers rather than thermal detonators. Given the space to finely craft their parts, and the forced necessity of making it as lean and fine-tuned as possible, the band rose to the challenge and did so. While doing so, Hella have gone past the static orbit of being an all-too-common indie-”artsy” oddity and are now on their way to reaching new galaxies as a more fully realized creative force.

Filed under indie-rock prog