Loving HELLA by Nick Reinhart

Submission number five is written by Nick Reinhart. He is a massively talented guitarist/vocalist/effects guru, who plays guitar and sings in Tera Melos and bygones. Tera Melos will be doing six west coast shows in april with the recently reunited fIREHOSE, then play in basically every part of Europe from late april to late june. Their follow up to the brilliant LP, Patagonian Rats, is due next year via Sargent House. For more about Tera Melos, check f'book and the twit-thing.

"i first saw hella in 2001. a friend of mine had told me about this band, crime in choir, and how they had a really awesome drummer. we were both really into electronic music and had heard that crime in choir had a similar vibe, but with all live instrumentation. i remember scoffing at my friend trying to describe how the drummer played. i thought "there's no way someone could play like that." they were playing in placerville at a coffee shop. i don't think i'd ever been to placerville at that point, but i recall the drive really sucking and feeling carsick going through a bunch of windy back roads. we got to the venue and heard that crime in choir wasn't playing for some reason. that was a bummer, but then we found out some other band with the drummer from CIC was playing. ok fair enough. stood around for a bit. i think pocket for corduroy played that night as well (very rad band). the band that played instead of CIC was called Hella. they set up, started playing and i think my face must have gone white. it was definitely one of the coolest things i'd ever seen. they were selling a junky demo cd-r, which years later i found out was called Leather diamond. it had 3 songs on it and they sold it in a blue, handmade sleeve with a kinkos sticker on it that just said "hella." each disc had an individually hand drawn face. i definitely listened to that thing a million times. it was one of my very first, if not thee first, exposure to super outside the box music done with real instruments (non-electronic music). i think at that point i may had already gotten into fugazi which would probably qualify as the only other radically different thing i'd heard outside punk music.

anyways, the three songs on the demo would later be re-recorded the next year with a bunch of other awesome songs that became "hold your horse is." so while the quintessential hella record wouldn't come out until a year later, i had already had my mind ripped apart by a preview of what was yet to come."