What would you get if you extracted key members from math rock mega-group, Hella, gave their high-profile drummer the conductor’s baton and let him flesh out his ultimate musical fantasies with the likes of Primus’ Les Claypool; the Advantage’s Robbie Moncrief; Deftones/Team Sleep’s Chino Moreno; and The Smell royalty, No Age? If your answer was, “Fuck. A whole lot of noise?” then you’re on the right track. Throw in The Flying Luttenbachers’s, Jonathan Hicshke; !!!/LCD Soundsystem’s Tyler Pope; the phenomenal Marnie Stern, and more, and you’ve got the makings of something truly and absolutely fascinating, Pitchfork calling it, “the best band ever (maybe an exaggeration but not a joke).”

This is what the aforementioned Hella co-founder and drummer, Zach Hill, managed to facilitate in creating his debut solo LP, Astrological Straits. Widely identified as one of the most innovative drummers of modern music with the rabbit-footed ability to work a room like three drummers in one, his prolific output of records with countless bands and collaborations since the late ’nineties have lead some to declare him more than just a single artist: Hill’s been branded a one-man genre. It was with this colossal level of experience and expertise that Hill came to produce the formidable Astrological Straits, a swirling mash of jittery math rock and shamelessly unrelenting noise beneath a wave of alien-like vocals that impart some kind of warped whimsy amongst such heady, erratic commotion. For Hill, those unapologetically off-kilter beats and rhythms are a necessity, perfection rendering itself, “meaningless when we’re talking about expressing honest human energy.” So if you like your music to be for the most part in-time, you’ll need look elsewhere (and then we can all snicker at your obtuse lack of sensitivity as you leave, you cretinous Neanderthal, you).

Astrological Straits is being released on August 12th via Ipecac Recordings and Anticon.

Zach Hill – Dark Art

Zack Hill – Momentum

- bec