Send "Hella " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 No matter how much Hella have juggled their lineup, the music has always sounded the same. The Sacramento-bred spazz-rock duo's done the OutKast split-solo album thing (Church Gone Wild/Chirpin' Hard), given its songs the coffee-shop open-mike treatment (Acoustics), and revamped itself into a five-piece supergroup (There's No 666 In Outer Space). Yet through all of these rearrangements and reinventions, the band has rarely deviated from its staple schtick: shreddy guitars, frenetic drumming, and hooks scavenged from the Power Glove era of Nintendo gaming. Sometimes it was hard to tell if they were dedicated to a singular vision or stuck within one.Following a four-year hiatus, Tripper finds Hella back to their original two-piece incarnation, with founding members Spencer Seim and Zach Hill on guitar and drums. It's business as usual: spastic pounding, warp-speed scalar runs, and various math-rock feats of strength. Tripper is a more focused effort, but only in comparison to the wanton schizophrenia of other Hella records. On "Long Hair" Seim gets more melody out of fewer notes, sticking to single riffs for longer stretches of time. On "Yubacore" Hill plays with dynamics, interrupting his constant stream of abstract fills with a few simple, spacious grooves. Hella are never relaxed, but they no longer sound like they're sprinting to get to the end of the record. For all of the sweaty battering and calculated sloppiness, Hella's music always retained an inorganic feel. They make high volume but emotionally distant music. The band's main muse, in spirit if not in sound, is Devo. That hasn't changed on Tripper. Hella's peers-- art-school shredders like Mick Barr (Orthrelm, Krallice) and Lightning Bolt-- found their inspiration in hardcore punk and more extreme strains of metal. Though their playing is repetitive and mechanical, it's framed as a quasi-spiritual pursuit and, in Lighting Bolt's case, done in the hopes of producing a sweaty moshpit meltdown. Hella's intent is more arch. The song titles-- "Kid Life Crisis", "Psycho Bro"-- are meaningless goofs. The music's unpredictable and schizophrenic architecture subverts earnest headbanging. On Tripper, Hella's instrumental chops are better than ever, but riffs aside, there's not much to think about....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| The big fuss over Hella's last album, 2007's There's No 666 in Outer Space, was the band's expansion from a duo to a five-member group. The biggest talking point for Tripper, though accompanied by significantly less commotion than its predecessor, is the band's return to their original two-person structure. Yet the idea of the amount or classification of members in a band mattering at all ends up revealing how out of step a group like Hella is with today's musical climate, where the divide between bands and solo artists and any other type of performer has significantly eroded, if not disappeared completely. In short, there may have been a time when a two-man outfit cranking full-bodied, band-worthy rock music seemed like something novel, but it's nothing noteworthy in a world full of mysterious laptop alchemists and lone geniuses with myriad instruments and loop pedals. In the early years of the aughts, groups like Hella, Lightning Bolt, and Death from Above 1979 made this dynamic seem like something noteworthy, positioning it as a furtherance of that era's obsession with stripping rock down to its basic elements. But like Lightning Bolt, fellow egg-headed purveyors of a sturm-und-drang drum-and-guitar attack, Hella was never a rock band, instead pursuing noisy riffage as a kind of latter-day extension of free jazz, all scrambled drumbeats and jagged distortion. In that sense, Hella and their math-rock brethren have always been a little recherché, sneakily casting up clouds of maximal expressionism while making it seem refreshingly simplistic. That iconoclasm continues with the fiddly racket of Tripper, but at this point the stubborn reliance on repetitive experimentation and physical instruments feels more than a little stale at a time when the sonic possibilities open to noise music have proven endless. Consequently, the songs that work best here are the ones that explore different sonic permutations of the band's usual intricate sound. "Kid Life Crisis" hops around on a distorted bed of multi-tracked drums, infiltrated by skittering drum-machine lines and thick reams of guitar. "Furthest" takes a brief break from a drum-pounded country-rock riff for a sludgy descent into a whirlpool of noise. Moments like this are respites on an album that's otherwise much too dense, too intricate, and too unremittingly fast to really enjoy....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Like the Northern California-derived slang word the band takes their name from, the style of music Hella is most comfortable in is rather overdone. As talented as guitarist Spencer Seim and drummer Zach Hill are, the type of math rock they purvey has been done by bands both better and worse many times over. Progressive rock, whose fixation on rapidly altering time signatures and instrumental prowess math rock takes much of its cues from, is likewise filled with bands trying to prove their years spent at Julliard were not wasted. Since their debut release, 2002’s cleverly titled Hold Your Horse Is, Hill and Seim have quite effectively shown themselves to have mastery over their instruments, at times succumbing to indulgence but also staying grounded in their particular style. Hella’s last outing, 2007’s There Is No 666 in Outer Space, was a first for the band in that it featured three additional members, one of them a vocalist. Hella’s normally instrumental output wasn’t miles different with someone singing atop it; the band’s creativity and penchant for absurdly hilarious song titles (“Anarchists Just Wanna Have Fun” comes to mind) were just as they had always been. Though the record wasn’t terrible, it certainly didn’t seem to befit the band as well as their frequent displays of instrumental prowess does. Fortunately, then, Tripper serves as a return to form for the band. The lineup has returned to the duo of Seim and Hill. As a result, there’s nary a hint of vocals on the record; the album’s concise running time, at just under forty minutes, is an entirely instrumental affair. Hill and Seim, as always, give it all from start to finish; though there are some not-quite-blistering tempos, there aren’t any slow ones. The band’s energy is impeccable, especially given the complexity of the music. Also, the band fortunately doesn’t become too overindulgent on the record, which makes for a pleasant listen. But there’s the rub; though Tripper succeeds in not being too over the top and serving as an apt summation of the band’s style, it sounds just a little too lived-in. The band’s skill at switching to an odd time signature unexpectedly is still evident, but when that same trick is being pulled over the course of an entire album its effect begins to wear off. Album opener “Headless” sets the tone for the rest of the record; nearly every track after it mirrors its winding complexity, with Seim’s at times elliptic guitar lines and Hill’s disheveled drum beats meshing in a baffling display of musical virtuosity. The songs always have some sort of groove, but at times the persistent polyrhythms and time signature changes seem so odd that one can’t help but just be both confused and impressed simultaneously. Even though the highly technical approach of the record wears even over a short course of time, it’s still very well done. This is true even of the record’s strangest moments, such as the downtuned, dissonant drum outro on “Netgear,” where Hill plays the drums in such a way that it sounds as if the snare is moments from falling apart....full text |
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