The PhiLL(er)



Human Bell Cover
Human Bell

Human Bell
Thrill Jockey Records

Dave Heumann and Nathan Bell are the guitarists behind (or in front of) this record, as the punning name and album title suggest. There's a deceptive simplicity at the heart of each piece on this album, and (it's not necessarily the same thing) at the heart of the album itself. Each piece builds from a simple line, and then expands outward through repetition, small variation and supporting rhythms and percussion, although the structures that these patterns involve are not necessarily rigid. The musical idiom is grounded somewhere in a dusty-road folk-blues foundation, but not necessarily at the center of that idiom, and it varies without straying too far from the cornerstone, which gives the album as a whole both a coherence and—again—expanding quality that is difficult to express in words, but intriguing and also exciting to listen to over the course of forty-five minutes. There's a logical, if not entirely accurate, comparison to be drawn with the work Bill Frisell has done on albums like "Ghost Town", insofar as the artists are working with some basic themes with, again, folk/country blues roots, but exploring the directions those ostensibly simple themes can travel. The music here doesn't impress with melody, but rather, using simple melodies, conjures atmosphere, and conjures it impressively. This is thoughtful music that repays repeated full-attention listening. It's somewhat disingenuous to single out particular tracks, given the strong thematic overlap and coherence of the album as a whole, but at the center of the album is the ten-minute "Hanging from the Rafters", which features Human Bell working in its richest and most hypnotic textures, combined with pulsing rhythms.