HESSE KASSEL - La Brea

On RateYourMusic – refugium peccatorum for music nerds raised on bread and Internet – “La Brea” is already something of a phenomenon: fifteenth best album of the year. A remarkable feat for the studio debut of a Chilean six-piece, formed only in November 2022 in Santiago and with, so far, just one live EP released in 2024. International reference points aside, though, the band's approach will speak clearly to Italian listeners too: anyone who grew up on Massimo Volume and Uzeda will have no trouble recognizing themselves in the spoken-word declamations, the jagged patterns and the claustrophobic atmosphere that serves as the starting point – though not always, as we'll see, the endpoint – of many tracks on the record.

Despite the geographical distance, Hesse Kassel – Renatto Olivares (guitar, sax and vocals), Luca Cosignani (guitar and vocals), Mauricio Rosas (guitar), Matthew Hopper (bass), Eduardo Padilla (drums) and Joaquín González (keyboards and backing vocals) – are already being ideally traced back to the strand that RateYourMusic has begun labeling Windmill Scene, borrowing the name from the Brixton pub that launched bands like Black Midi, Black Country, New Road, Squid. Compared to their British counterparts, however, their sound is (even) less easily filed under the endless reiterations of post-post-punk. The real sonic pull, in fact, is above all the legacy of another fetish scene of the more cerebral alternative underground: that of Louisville – Slint, Rodan, June Of 44. With the imprint of Steve Albini emerging in all its stark, abrasive, tortuous character.

“Postparto” opens the record racing along math Crimson-esque trajectories, somewhere near the genre's sharpest-edged acts – Craw, Quicksand, Dazzling Killmen and the like. At least until piano, jazzy drums and finally sax steal the scene, steering the mood toward more overtly progressive territory. Glimmers that recall, if anything, the post-rock tangles of Gastr Del Sol. This game of metamorphosis is a distinctive trait of the album: “Anova” too is built on fractures, graftings and sudden turns, right up to a chamber-like, choral finale that moves from the same premises as the latest Black Country, New Road, but – it must be said – with more convincing results.

Indeed, Hesse Kassel express their personality best on the more stretched-out tracks, where the songwriting becomes elastic and can explore a rich dynamic range without resorting to soft/loud clichés. “En Tiempo Muerto” opens on a hypnotic circularity, in the vein of late June Of 44, and unfolds between thickening and thinning textures, deliberately avoiding catharsis. A similar principle also guides “Vida en Terranova”, which weaves its initial harshness together with clearer harmonic structures, playing on contrasts without ever giving in to emphasis. On “Moussa”, thirteen minutes built around a 7/8 pulse, they even manage to evoke the controlled tension of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but with less grandiloquence and more geometric coldness.

Only on two tracks does the intensity truly take over: “A. Latur”, a stubborn, head-on piece of jazzcore that nonetheless knows how to open up into measured, Slint-like emptyings-out, and the closing “Yo La Tengo”, which entrusts the record's ending to a swamp of nervous tension and abrasiveness, where screams and jagged riffs deny any hope of a happy ending.
As in the heart of the math-rock era, the progressive constructions here don't seek the epic or the imaginative, but curl in on themselves, always remaining within a cynical horizon, devoid of illusions. Gratuitous, then? No. Maybe not for everyone. It doesn't aim to be – and that's precisely why it leaves a mark.

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29/04/2025