Hold Your Horse Is

In an era of DIY super-musicians such as Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale and Orthrelm’s Mick Barr, Hella drummer Zach Hill was perhaps the true alpha. A player who seemingly heard rhythm in four dimensions, he found infinite ways to chop and micro-fragment his beats via a jaw-dropping homegrown technique built around a bionic-sounding kick-drum attack. His arrival on Hold Your Horse Is, Hella’s 2002 debut, felt akin to an indie-scale “Eruption,” but the album’s real triumph is its sheer musicality. More than any of their contemporaries, Hill and guitarist Spencer Seim — himself a wizardly player who wielded an orchestral array of tactics, from roaring washes of sound to gnarled staccato bursts —  wrote wondrously catchy and consistently gripping songs. There are hooks galore here — the woozy, decelerating verse in “Republic of Rough and Ready”; the stomping payoff in “Been a Long Time Cousin”; the Nintendo-soundtrack-poignant home-stretch bridge in “City Folk Sitting, Sitting” — and as brain-scrambling as the playing still sounds nearly a quarter century on, these are what really cement the album’s place as a masterpiece of instrumental rock.