Hesse Kassel

La Brea

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Cal Cashin hails a scorching debut album by Chilean art rock group Hesse Kassel which comfortably spans the power and textures of Godspeed, early BC,NR, Shellac and Swans

La Brea is a truly inexplicable, revelatory debut. Spending 80 minutes with Chilean band Hesse Kassel, and their writhing, scampering, soaring post rock, is as genuinely life-affirming as it gets. It is music of the most cathartic and reinvigorating nature, and an elemental listening experience that makes everything feel new, exciting, and possible. The sextet from Santiago spend most of their debut trawling dark, gristly undertow, but within their sprawling, flowing ten minute songs, they always break through into euphoria.

The band take their cues from the breadth of the post rock and post hardcore arcana while fashioning their own niche explosive execution. Throughout, you can hear echoes of the heavenbound crescendos of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, skeletal sketches of Spiderland, and the scorched earth firestorms of Swans, but, of course, it is what the group do with these references that really enthrals. Hesse Kassel gleefully stitch multiple disparate segments into one cohesive whole, whilst boasting a sublime mastery of tension and release, and the wild-eyed ambition of youth that makes it all seem so effortless. So, little more than two years after their formation, they are already the complete package, a real force of nature.

Opener ‘Postparto’ serves as a microcosm of the whole album, tetchiness and paranoia giving way to euphoria. The group’s two lead guitarists Luca Cosignani and Mauricio Rosas weave a knotty tapestry of spidery, discordant scribble, whilst frontman Renatto Olivares alternates between babbling, whites-of-the-eyes sprechstimme vocals, and sumptuous film noir saxophone lines. Olivares’ lyrics are entirely in Spanish, but so emotive are his convulsing vocals, that there is no problem gleaming meaning from them.

As every band of this nature simply must, Hesse Kassel possess a totally intuitive, electric chemistry. A totally alchemical understanding of one another, that allows them to really spark off of each other’s melodic ideas. The musicians especially, Cosignani, Rosas, and Olivares, when he puts down the saxophone, share inspiring interplay throughout. The closing two tracks – the heaviest and darkest on the album – are perhaps the best testament to this.

‘A. Latur’ is a bombastic instrumental that sees razor sharp riffs, knockout blows, in the vein of both Shellac’s post hardcore precision and the punishing noise of Lightning Bolt, before Olivares meets these with a furious saxophone skronk that makes it sound as though a swarm of wasps is fighting to get out of his horn. ‘Yo La Tengo’, meanwhile, is a climactic and frenetic closer – a firestorm of guitar noise, impassioned yelping and thundering basslines, as Hesse Kassel proverbially leave nothing out there on the pitch.

That’s not to say, though, that La Brea is solely an hour and a half of angry young men clawing for catharsis from darkness and nihilism. A number of the songs here strive for something else – naked, ecstatic beauty. ‘Anova’, ‘Americana’, and ‘Moussa’ are such songs, the former an especially magical love song, that sees Olivares’ ashen croon met with soaring group vocals and trilling Glassworks piano, devotional and glorious, whilst the latter is notable for beautiful, glacial, and patient ambient sections.

At least to me, the main influence for this record – at both its stormiest and its sunniest – sounds like it is the iconoclastic first two Black Country, New Road albums. From its moments of taut sprechgesang post punk, to its passages of astral chamber rock, Hesse Kassel channel the best elements of the Isaac Wood-fronted BC,NR without ever aping them.

But the ambition, the scope and the conviction Hesse Kassel demonstrate here ensures that La Brea stands on its own two feet as a truly singular album, one that yields the awesome power of its influences without ever being derivative. The crown jewel of a thriving music scene at the foot of the Andes, this is quite possibly the most vital debut you’ll stumble upon all year.

The self-released La Brea is out now to buy digitally from Bandcamp

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