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White Hills, "H-p1"
Acid Mothers Temple have had their spot on Hawkwind's vacant space-rock throne pretty much locked down for years, but it increasingly looks like they are going to have to share it with White Hills.  This double album is an explosive and oft-angry monolith of hard rockin', in-the-red psych rock excess that is alternately exhausting and exhilarating.
White Hills do one thing better than almost anyone else: bludgeoningly repetitive, volcanic guitar freak-outs.  In fact, H-p1 opens with one ("The Condition of Nothing") and it is pretty face-melting.  The problem is that the success or failure of that type of song is almost entirely dependent on how much I like the main riff and they do not always nail it.  Another serious problem is that White Hills cannot just keep churning out variations of that same song indefinitely.  They admittedly have a few other tricks up their sleeves, but not quite enough to sustain the momentum necessary to make an 80-minute album compelling from start to finish.
Naturally, the "bad-ass riff plus wild Dave W. shredding" songs like the title piece and "Upon Arrival" largely steal the show.  They are exactly what I enjoy and expect from White Hills.  I don't know if I would describe Dave as a genius or a virtuoso, but he definitely hits all the right spots as far as frenzied wah-wah-heavy guitar squalls are concerned.  He excels at what he does, but what he does is very specific.  Fortunately, there are a few very likable divergences amidst these 9 songs as well.  The biggest surprise is probably "Paradise," a killer white noise-heavy motorik work-out featuring guest drumming from Oneida's Kid Millions.  There are also a few space-y synth-based soundscapes centered around special guest Shazzula Nebula, which is definitely a step in the right direction sequencing-wise.  I enjoyed the oscillating interstellar loneliness of "A Need to Know" quite a bit, but the sheer fact that the band's crushing onslaught is now broken up a bit by oases of relative calm is far more important than the actual content of the guitarless pieces.  The new textures, contrasts, and melodic passages make a huge difference in enhancing the listenability of the album and heightening the impact of the heavy parts.
While there were a few meandering  and less-than-compelling pieces like "Monument"(basically just a drum solo with some bleeps and whooshes over it), this is generally a pretty solid batch of songs.  H-p1's main issue is that there is simply too much material to digest in one dose–this album is overwhelming.  That problem is confounded by the fact that Dave's vocals are almost always of the urgent/angry/howling variety, which can get a bit tiring.  I understand that the band's anti-corporate/consumerist message lends itself to that sort of delivery, but I definitely welcomed the more laid-back, chant-like vocals in "The Condition of Nothing" as well the songs that had no singing at all.  It is not that he is a bad vocalist, but he is a pretty one-dimensional one.  Despite those caveats, however, White Hills is very powerful musical entity; it's just that they are one that is still best appreciated in smaller doses at this point in their career.
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