It is high time for a new Sonic Youth in America. There is a smug safety most new indie bands seem to draw from. Power pop, garage revival and ironic rock produce some nifty songs, but nothing seems to have the danger and taboo that noise rock used to. I miss it. I miss abrasive, gutsy, edgy songs. I miss music that I could never sleep after. I miss noisy, clanky, loud songs. I want someone to pick up where they left off. And Sacremento's Hella might be that band.
Bottles and hairpins dislodging the position of guitar strings, you weren't just listening to hear a new song with '80s Sonic Youth but to hear new sounds entirely. And although it was jarring, offsetting, hard-to-listen-to stuff, Sonic Youth was, at the same time, brilliant and fresh. Sonic Youth produced rough and ragged music but always emphasized the melody behind the noise.
\Noise rock,"" ""pigfuck,"" ""industrial,"" whatever name you give the once-fertile genre that gave birth to Sonic Youth, it has long since faltered. Death Metal picked up the loud but not the thinking behind it. The name industrial was co-opted by bands like Nine Inch Nails and the Thrill Kill Kult to describe evil disco.
Music as a whole has become less daring and more simple, more swaggering and less substance. The newness of noise rock ran out, and no band stepped up to rejuvenate it. Even Sonic Youth has become less about the noise and more about the smartly written song. Shocking music, loud music,and blistering music all have begun to be euphemisms for gimmicky pop. The challenge is missing from most new records.
There was a time when you could mail a used broken guitar to Sonic Youth so that they could mutilate it into an instrument to play their sounds. It isn't that time anymore. It is a time of Belle and Sebastian and the indie pop groups, the White Stripes and the neo-garagers. Today's noise is a slight nod to the distortion pedal. Today's daring is pretty safe.
It's a strange time for a band like Hella to be recording music.
Daring. Damn daring. Hella is the band Sonic Youth might have been if they had formed as a two-man group in a post Sonic Youth world.
The Devil Isn't Red will be Hella's fourth full length album, released yesterday on the Kill Rock Stars affiliated 5 Rue Christine. Faster than Sonic Youth ever was, more chaotic, the two-man unit fills the space that would have been occupied by vocals with spastic drum work or oscillating guitar. More confrontational than anything that came from the '80s noise rock movement, Hella's music lurches and jerks through songs in rapidly changing tempos.
But through all this The Devil Isn't Red keeps pounding out songs that can be hummed, instrumentals with choruses, songs that exist outside of a mere wall of noise. Sounding like their songs could fall apart at any minute their sound always leaves that tinge of doubt they are consistently getting lucky.
It's hard to listen to The Devil Isn't Red in a single sitting, even though the album weighs in at a petty 28 minutes - Hella plays up the abrasiveness on each track. But even if the album is extremely jagged, many songs are just as catchy. Fans will be humming ""Brown Medal 2003"" after the first few sloppy verses. However, the album's standout is the guitar haphazardly missing the beat in ""Hello Great Architects of the Universe."" The Devil Isn't Red is an example of meticulous disorder.
Hella's sound is faster, and with far less harmony then the old noise-rock bands, but as Sonic Youth left noise-rock to start playing alternative, the edginess left with it. If the goal of Kill Yr Idols was to hang the most dirt on a song while keeping it musical, if the goal was to record a challenge for music listeners who had grown smug with the current sound of music, Hella might be the new Sonic Youth.
Using the vast, communicative expanses of the Internet, say hi to Joe at jhuchill@wisc.edu.
