Hella Ain't Shit But Good People + News + Admiring Ruins (review)

Aw now you know that just isn't true!

Not only are Zach Hill & Spencer Seim fine human beings, but they are also Hella amazing. I'm not just talking two of modern music's most prolific amped-up jazz spazzes, I'm talking about two guys who make a racket so fiercly electric they give Lightning Bolt a run for their money! Hella are a masterfully crafted force of freakin' nature, and they've recently made an announcement- they're going Acoustic. On September 12th Hella will be releasing the Acoustics Ep on 5RC records, revamping several of their old calamitous classics into acoustic jam freakouts.

Here's the tracklisting:

1) 1-800-Ghost Dance
2) Women of the 90's
3) Cafeteria Bananas
4) Biblical Violence
5) Welcome to the Jungle Baby,Your Gunna Live!
6) The Devil Isn't Red

I say, Hell-Ya! But if that wasn't quite enough...

Hella will also be releasing a new full-length in January 2007 on Ipecac Records, featuring- get this- a 5 piece band! Hella are planning to take the year off to release the Acoustics Ep and finish recording their Ipecac debut. They are currently on tour with The Advantage, Mick Barr & Zach Hill, and These Arms Are Snakes, and can be found on their merry way towards the following cities:

06-23 Visalia, CA – Howie and Sons Pizza
06-24 San Francisco, CA – Bottom of the Hill
06-25 Sacramento, CA – The Library
06-26 Portland, OR – Loveland
06-27 Olympia, WA – The Capitol
06-28 Vancouver, BC – Red Room
06-29 Seattle, WA - Neumos

In other news...

M. Ward will be coming out with the follow-up to last years Transistor Radio on August 22nd, 2006. The album is called Post-War, and features 12 songs including, of all things, a Daniel Johnston cover!

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Ruins - 1985:1992 & Vrresto
Released on Skin Graft Records (2004, 2005)

Released in 2004 on Skin Graft Records, 1985:1992 is an unbelievable reminder of just how revolutionary the explorations of Tatsuya Yoshida's Ruins were- and would continue to be if Yoshida could just find himself a new bassist. The Japanese progressive rock underground has long been noted for taking Western musical forms, subverting and infusing them with Japanese artistic sensibility and traditional music tropes- Ruins, however, were something utterly alien in the Japan of 1985. A combination of the several specific aesthetic influences; a variation on the operatic vocal stylings of Zeuhl- made infamous by French drummer Christian Vander's progressive rock group Magma- numerous punk and progressive rock groups, and the magnitude, craft, and spirit of various shrines, temples, and landmarks- all led to the creation of a mind-blowing drum and bass duo for which there was simply no precendent.

To try and put Ruins into the context of when these songs first appeare, consier this: this was a time before Lightning Bolt, Pink and Brown, Hella, or any of the ever-multiplying wave of "noise rock" bands and LOAD Records imitations we know (and sometimes love) today. Many of these releases were on obscure Japanese labels, or Yoshida's own Magaibitsu imprint- which he still maintains to this day. 1985:1992 was culled from 5 Ruins albums- three of them confusingly all titled Ruins, later tracks featured from the landmark releases Stonehenge and Burning Stone. Yoshida remastered each composition on the record, somehow managing to give the impression that they were all recorded at the same time. In their remastered form, classic Ruins compositions like Zasca Cosca and Praha in Spring, sound even better than they did in their original forms- on Stonehenge and Burning Stone, respectively.

Vrresto, the second Ruins album I picked up from Skin Graft, was remastered in 2005 by Yoshida, and was originally released in Japan in 1998. Vrresto marked the appearance of Ruins' fourth bassist, Sasaki Hishashi- an incredibly gifted musician with a wild thirst for improvisation matched only by Yoshida's own. Vrresto is a transition record, to be sure, and only on occasion does its anarchic structure give shape to the incredible, and occasionally beautiful complexity featured later on albums such as Pallaschtom and Tzomborgha. That being said: Vrresto is a delirious document in Ruins history, and when listening to it one really gets the sense that Yoshida is not simply going through the motions of shouting his ridiculously operatic pseudo-Kobian vocal workouts- but is actually having a great time fucking around with Hishashi. Hisashi, not content with simply being a virtuoso on the bass, also operates a midi-controller while playing- adding colourful synth splashes into the already deliriously exhuberant mix. Vrresto is the sound of two neo-prog warriors fighting a war of absurdity- racing each-other up a mountain of Fun.

Vrresto & 1985: 1992 are both highly recommended to any fan of noise-rock, avant-jazz, Zeuhl, or just joyful, fucked up fun.



Peace

-Christian