Hella: Hold Your Horse Is (Deluxe Reissue) Album Review – Warungku Terkini

Has there ever been a genre name that sounded more eager to be shoved into a locker than math rock? Even the bands who spearheaded the sound—Polvo, Don Caballero, Ruins—distanced themselves from the term, rejecting the cold, dispassionate calculations that it conjures. Though legions of groups have wheeled out odd meters and looping pedals as if they were performing parlor tricks, those that transcended simple gimmickry tapped into something rawer and deeper. The bands that made the sound exciting in the first place are those who forced you to stop counting time altogether.

Sacramento’s Hella miraculously pulled this off by taking their calculus to its most extreme endpoint. They may have been the nerdiest band of them all: When they formed, guitarist Spencer Seim was in another group dedicated to playing Nintendo covers, while Zach Hill had dropped out of high school to play drums for as much as seven hours a day. Technical complexity was essential to their experimental style of noise rock, but it wasn’t the goal; Hella’s music followed a stream-of-consciousness logic, apparently spontaneous in spite of its intense choreography. The product of two California boys taking cues from Zeppelin, Zappa, and Hendrix, their music refracted vintage rock lore through a skater outcast mindset, all brewed in the cauldron of ’90s DIY. Together they created something that sounded like the platonic ideal of what math rock could be, while nevertheless existing in a brain-rewiring universe all its own.

The band came about by accident. Their high school quartet Legs On Earth fell apart after their lead vocalist fell into heroin addiction, and Seim and Hill realized they weren’t going to be able to find any other musicians to play the kind of music they were envisioning. Slowly the two of them oriented their songs to be played by just a guitarist and drummer. Seim would double-tap his basslines while Hill searched for what he called “invisible pockets”—intervals he could reorganize his rhythms around to create new patterns that wouldn’t make sense in a normal meter. Their debut, Hold Your Horse Is, was a deliriously adventurous hybrid of punk and prog that thrashed with playful violence. Though later dalliances with OutKast-style double albums and expanded lineups demonstrated the band’s restlessness, Hold Your Horse Is remains the most thrilling snapshot of Hill and Seim’s frantic, far-out chemistry.

Kill Rock Stars has remastered and reissued the album to celebrate its 21st birthday, with the band’s original three-track label demo included as an extra 7″—a charmingly scrappy snapshot of an ambitious young duo working out its sound in the garage. The album has lost none of its power: When the Game Boy menu music of “The D. Elkan” first slams into “Biblical Violence,” Hill’s snares come crashing down like hail shattering through a sunroof. As Seim nimbly sprinkles triplets up and down the fretboard, Hill tosses grindcore blast beats and jazzy cymbals together as if they were always meant to be complementary flavors. In these songs, the guitarist’s and drummer’s roles are reversed, with Seim’s spidery riffs acting as a grounding agent for Hill to batter his instrument to kingdom come. The timbres of the drumming are as dazzling as the speed—utilizing custom-fitted pieces of trash and metal appliances in addition to his worn-out gear, Hill’s sound is coarse and rich, each snare hit colliding with such scalding power that listening to it for too long can start to make you sweat.