hella

the devil isn't red

'One can only imagine that this CD is the soundtrack to one of Les Claypool's wet dreams. The guitar and drum work sounds lifted directly out of something he had a hand in himself. It's anything but ordinary. This is instrumentalism in a looser sense of the word, noise in the more traditional sense.

It's a different way of thinking, a creative and original way of structuring songs. This is how Jackson Pollock would have written music - multiple crescendos of sound spattered, one on top of the other, across the musical canvas of an album. I picture the two band members looking like a cross between Ed Harris and They Might Be Giants. That comparison has little to do with the sound but, hey, if they can assume what color the Prince of Darkness isn't, I can assume what they look like.

"The Devil Isn't Red" is that piece of art about which the reviews are split equally between "brilliant" and "I don't get it."

This has to be a California band. Nobody in the rest of the country would think to write music like this. Nor would anyone else use the word Hella.

File this under misunderstood geniuses, lovers of performance art or ?bermodernism.

It's good, I think, but maybe it's just the pressure to appreciate that which I cannot understand.

Best song title: "Welcome to the Jungle Baby, You're Gonna Live!" Take that, Axl Rose.