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Rating: "Hold your horse is," debut album dated 2002 by the Californians Hella, is one of the most brilliant records released in the 2000s.
From the point of view of this writer, this work is perhaps the only successful attempt to make nonsense and experimental music while being listenable and structurally complete at the same time. Hella is an instrumental band that plays a musical genre called math rock, which draws strong influences from progressive, jazz, and noise music, a highly experimental blend where disjointed and syncopated rhythms follow each other obsessively. While the key groups of the genre are bands like Don Caballero and Polvo, Hella, although inspired by them, take this particular type of music to a level never seen before, as they succeed in the challenging task of making inherently difficult and cold music warm and catchy. "Hold your horse is" more than the aforementioned bands, seems to be the offspring of historic albums like "Trout Mask Replica" by Captain Beefheart and "Frizzle Fry" by Primus.
The first track of the album "The D.Elkan" is nothing but a joke; it is a ditty in the style of a 16-bit video game, the real album begins with "Biblical Violence" and immediately one is struck by the absurd, clumsy yet melodic and technically complex style. As you continue listening to the subsequent tracks, you quickly realize the immediacy of the album thanks to the rather short duration of each track (something quite unusual for a purely experimental album) and their well-conceived structure. Everything is balanced just right, moving through a variety of genres with the highest peaks at "Republic of Rough & Ready" and the concluding "Better Get a Broom".
When you consider that this chaos with a soul was played and composed only by a guitarist (Spencer Seim) and a drummer (Zach Hill), the word masterpiece comes naturally.
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