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.
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Dank Richardus!