A crucial piece of the Loren Connors jigsaw falls into place with this first ever vinyl reissue of Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!, now presented on wax some 20 years after the original CD issue thru The Lotus Sound. Leading on from his classic Long Nights (on Table of the Elements), it takes that album’s blues-noise textures into even starker, scorched ground surely irresistible to anyone snagged by his other works, for their anomalous nature if nowt else.
Revolving around 12 works in under 20 minutes, Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! is a succinct album that sparks and growls with an anger and anguish that distinguishes it from much of his other work. It’s hardly a rager, but there are flashes of an undisclosed pain that seem to sear thru on the many of the A-side cuts, fulminating dense walls of distorted sound like heavy shag smoke that cloaks your listening space in yellow-grey palls.
He spends much of his energies churning up this intoxicating sound on the A-side, so that by the B-side he’s back to a more reserved, but still gripping, sort of expression, including some exquisitely tender, even barely-there pieces, vacillating between burned-out blues and devastatingly strung-out nocturnes, all with the sort of minimalist efficiency of expression that we really value over here. Not to be missed! (Boomkat)