Hella
Hold Your Horse Is (Deluxe Reissue)
5 RUE CHRISTINE
There are rock drummers, and then there is Zach Hill. He’s not a man—or a bird or a plane, for that matter. Hill is a superheroic figure capable of powering through a virtually nonstop 90-minute set while retaining gobsmacking control over his drum kit. At The Echo in Los Angeles in 2005, when his band Hella had hit its stride as the most mesmerizing math-rock group in town, attendees of their show crowded as close as they could to the front of the venue. They weren’t trying to stage-dive, just crane their necks as strenuously as possible to get a glimpse—however fleeting—of the madman responsible for the cyclonic rat-a-tat-ing that made the club sound like a torrent of rain was pouring onto a tin roof. If you’d brought the city’s best street drummer to the show, they would’ve cried during most of it.
You didn’t need to grow up with posters of John Bonham or Neil Peart on your bedroom wall to admire the marvel that is Zach Hill. You just needed to know that, if you thought the best drummer you’d ever seen played like a martial-arts expert, witnessing Hill would be like seeing a parkour professional for the first time. Hill can drum with more speed and accuracy than you or any of your friends can text. He’s the Ken Jennings of drummers. He’s a LeBron, a Messi, a Simone Biles. Everyone from The Mars Volta’s Omar Rodríguez-López to Deftones’ Chino Moreno, Marnie Stern to Xiu Xiu—to say nothing of his collaborations with Tera Melos’ Nick Reinhart—have snagged Hill to perform on their records. He’s had an even more revered second career as a member of Death Grips, not to mention slipping out a few albums of his own over the years. Now 43, Hill’s likeness deserves a place next to the word “prolific” in the dictionary.
But no matter how talented a rock musician is (in all fairness, we won’t size Hill up against jazz drummers), they still need a band, even if only to showcase their incomparable skill in proper formation. In such a format, Hill’s dizzyingly nimble acrobatics are even more impressive to witness, because in keeping in time with the other musicians playing with him, his skills are brought into even greater relief. And that’s where Hella comes in. While anyone witnessing the Sacramento-spawned duo in concert would want Hill’s drum rig flipped around so the audience could appreciate his every lick, fill, and chop, they are, after all, a band with other pro members.
The core of Hella—which is technically still active, although their last release was a 2013 single—is Hill and fellow gearhead, precision guitarist, and decades-long friend Spencer Seim. (For his own part, Seim’s musical mastery is evidenced by his ability to play both melody and rhythm.) Hill and Seim expanded Hella into a quartet and then a quintet at various junctures in the mid-aughts. But those lineup changes proved temporary, with Hella’s core members minimizing the band to its original size by the end of the decade.
We haven’t heard much from Hella since then, which makes Kill Rock Stars imprint 5 Rue Christine’s re-release of the band’s first record well-timed and critical to keeping their unrivaled combustibility lodged in our brains, however deep. The deluxe edition of Hold Your Horse Is comes with remastered sound, which Hill-heads will dig even more than the package’s three previously unreleased bonus demos that capture the noisier and far less refined version of the band’s sound. Even 21 years after its initial release, Hella—and the debut album that got everyone talking about drumming demigod Zach Hill—still can’t be beat.
