Wackiness.org Reviews Archive § Music

As all Hella's EPs have done, "Wild Bass" strays from the drum-and-guitar duos of Hold Your Horse Is and introduces more of a synth-based sound. The drums are still there, wild and crazy like always, but we find the guitar work has been partnered with--sometimes replaced by--synthetic sounds. Computery-synthesizer-sounding melodies. Most of the songs are clearly no longer the work of two people and their instruments. And on the one hand, it adds more layers of sound to the songs than is possible with two instruments. But then it takes away some of the amazing qualities that Hold Your Horse Is has for being strictly one guitar and one drumset. The good outweighs the bad, though, and it's pretty solid overall. "Your DJ Children", after the goofy fake-rap intro, has an amazing IDM sort of Múm-random-notes thing in the background which they pull off extremely well, and the overlying guitar work is very well-done. "Magixburg" sounds the least synthy of the album, and sounds more like a Hold Your Horse Is kind of song. "Electric Guitar" has a cool-creepy-repetitive-fast guitar line over the whole song, and "Who Ray", the closer, has an amazingly cool guitar riff repeated for about half of the song, and spastic noise for the rest, with a strange vocal exit (see also intro). The CD also comes with an mpg video file of a live performance of "Brown Metal" in San Francisco, which is worth a watch. Overall, it's a much more polished sound than their awesome-great-fantastic debut, but it loses something in being that. Also, the title is pretty dumb. Still, overall: pretty awesome.

Rating

83/100

Reviewer

Noah Jackson

Published

September 02, 2003