Hella

Homeboy

(5RC)

Record Review by Michael Byrne

This EP is a companion piece to the Concentration Face DVD.

How many Nintendo kids had the “trapped in the video game” nightmare, where the curious conscience enlists the ballsy subconscious for a couple hours experiment in three-dimensions?  And how many of those children have forgotten that nightmare until now, when 5RC finally released the score to it?  (I can think of two anyway, and one of them isn’t necessarily into noise rock.)  Homeboy shows such a bizarre appreciation for those expired game soundtracks that it’s tempting to dig out an old console just for the sake of a listen.

Propping up the conventions of game music with Hella’s brand of frantic guitar and drum assault has the effect of texturizing a sound that, at best, has the kitschy, poking-through-someone-else’s-trash sort of appeal.  These conventions are given an independent identity on this disc, and often become a sort of sub-score to Hella’s sound.  And considering the initial challenge of writing game music, “composing” for the unpredictable, it makes sense.  Hella’s style is comprised essentially of sonic races between Spencer Seim’s guitar and Zach Hill’s percussion; if form ever becomes an issue, it’s in the vaguely call-and-response order of “Gothpel for You Not Them,” and this is also where the game music sound is at its least.  It’s at its most in the third song, “BC But Now Before Christ,” a grand recollection of the action-linked scores of accelerating puzzle games, with a pair of beeping synths matching Hill’s speeding tempo, and not so subtly calling to mind advanced-Tetris claustrophobia.  The trick is used again on the last song “If I Were in Hella I Would Eat Lick” with and accelerating synthesized (poorly, of course) organ.  

Shoved into the Homeboy mix at points are a few “I Broke Up” style adolescent freak-out samples, reminders that for plenty of kids/adults, that third dimension was/is a little more than a nightmare.  Go back to 1989 and open up a kid’s head: this is what the echo might sound like.