When it comes to the solo/side project work of Zach Hill, three categories come to mind: The Great (The Ladies, Damsel, Risil), The Grating (The Smokers, Nervous Cop), and the Just-Plain-FUGly (Team Sleep, Diamond Watch Wrists). He’s kept me plenty busy over the years chronicling his transformation from little-known, head-down drum whiz to the balls-out, all-or-nothing underground Figurehead we know today, and I can’t say I’ve ever regretted exploring a Hill-related record.
bygones, a collaboration with Nick Reinhart of Tera Melos (a fantastic little instrumental rock band in their own right), is among the best of Hill’s excursions because it succeeds in pairing two musicians who bring out each other’s best qualities. Much like Hill’s various projects with Rob Crow, bygones is a seamless endeavor, a head-on collision of two notorious talents that elicits some surprising results.
But let’s face it: if you’ve heard even one record by either of these musicians, you know what you’re getting into, and by- lives up to the legends told on high and then some. There’s plenty of flam-ing, riffing, and all-out ball-bashing, and that’s all well and good because it’s what they do; but what jolts about this new undertaking is an underlying emotion in the guitar playing and the way it drives the drumming to absolute frenzy.
Reinhart is that rare guitar player fluent in the most minute intricacies of his instrument. It might not sound like it sometimes — as this is a dare-you-to-stick-around dense record with all sorts of attention-testing layers you should really hear on headphones — but Reinhart is accomplishing all kinds of feats here. He’s making an honest drummer of Hill, for one. Hill’s a guy who has no problem with playing along to pretty much anything and everything, and that’s why we love him.
Can you put a price on such enthusiasm? No. But it does make it that much more noteworthy when a fellow shredder steps in and produces such a successful collaboration, buying the cow yet somehow getting the milk for free at the same time, as it were. Take a tune like “Up the Shakes”; it’s an honest-to-god song! Far from a random collage of drum rolls and finger-taps, it totes attitude on its way to the song bank, the icy spikes of guitar inflecting along with the vocals.
Speaking of vocals, they are the best stab at pairing words with Hill’s rhythmic rampage outside of Rob Crow's. The verses, if you can call them that, provide a semblance of structure, for once, and though outright choruses are never consistently realized, you can still use the vocals as a way to map out the complex charts the duo work through. It’s like marking a tree along a deep-woods path so you’ll recognize it on your way back, or like leaving a trail of cookie crumbs so the police will see that you’ve been abducted by a sick fuck of a nursery rhyme character and thrown into an oven in the middle of the forest.
It sounds extreme, but these are the tools we need to hunt and track this absurd strain of out-sound, avant-garde, free-form shred-rawk. For all their indulgences, bygones give you a reason to leave crumbs for the way home.
1. Cold Reading
2. Click on That (Smash the Plastic Death)
3. Not What It Is But What It's Not
4. Nu Cringe
5. Fool Evolved
6. Spray You With Yr Own Trip
7. Expelled
8. Up the Shakes
9. Ex-People
10. Error
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