Hella "Acoustics" (Kill Rock Stars)
By Lucas Salg
Tuesday. Sep 12, 1:23 PM
Pointless and headache-inducing.

Look, I’m an open-minded guy, I swear. There are lots of things I listen to that my friends will yell at me for playing in the car. Experimental drones, face-melting blast beats, screeching vocals, discordance… I can tolerate a lot of noise in my rock. But until I listened to the latest EP from Hella, I’d never gotten a headache from an album. Hella just may be the first band I had to stop listening to in order to preserve my sanity.

There are two problems here. First, Hella going acoustic is pretty pointless. It’s not as if you’re stripping back the distortion to reveal gorgeously crafted songwriting underneath. This is Hella we’re talking about, a band who has gotten way more mileage than they should have out of improvisational nonsense packaged as forward-thinking “music.” If you take away the distortion, what you basically have is barely audible acoustic guitar noodling being thoroughly trampled under the gale force of Zach Hill’s super-busy drumming… which is the other major problem. The dude cannot let one fucking measure go by without a roll, a fill, or both. Without the aid of distortion, keyboards, or similar bells and whistles, the melodic component of these songs – dubious as it may be to begin with – is totally lost.

I don’t deny that Hella are talented. What they have yet to do, however, is harness that talent and create anything beyond technically proficient but soulless noise / math freakouts. The day Hella can write a decent song, I’ll give them another shot. But unless you’re in the market for 24 brain-abusing minutes of percussive onslaught with no regard for melody, form, or structure, this EP is a real waste of time.
www.hellaband.com
www.killrockstars.com

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Lucas Salg

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