by Delia Rainey (@hellodeliaaaaa)
It seems like a really long time ago, almost two years ago, when many of us musicians and writers and artists were considering how pandemic isolation could provide us more time to create. As America’s chaos and unpreparedness was tumbling around, some of us were away from work, away from our usual collaborators, and away from the gaze of the outside world. Maybe Jason Albertini never made music for the outside world anyway. Albertini of Helvetia (and Duster) used the early-pandemic energy of loneliness and dread to habitually create one song a day, when he wasn’t homeschooling his daughter.
Albertini’s resulting collection of distorted experimental rock songs, Sudden Hex, quietly came out through a Joyful Noise project, the Gray Area Cassette Series. The series, honoring JNR’s beginnings as a cassette label, features limited old-school-gray tapes with new recordings by Joyful Noise artists (Ohmme, Reptar, Joan of Arc, etc.) Along with the lo-fi aesthetics of a cassette, the listening experience and vibe of Sudden Hex is more demo-like and raw than Helvetia’s June release, the press-hyped and world-building record Essential Aliens. The album cover for the tape even looks more like a zine cover or punk poster than that of the June album’s oozing blue contemporary painting. It may be tempting to assume that the fifteen tracks on Sudden Hex are Essential Aliens’ outtakes, but the album holds its own in Helvetia’s prolific archives. As thoughts roll out for “best albums” and highlights in this year of music, I consider it a special gift to have two Helvetia albums in 2021.
The songs on Sudden Hex remind me of brief basement scribblings, howlings, featuring Albertini’s recognizable guitar style stretching out riffs against sparse vocal mumblings. After a twenty second intro track, track two “Clatter Inn” spews a repetitive playful one-note beat. The clarity of Albertini’s voice appears in one song and out the other, like a radio station going in and out of antenna service. Lyrics like “the sickness you could not lick” in “Death Trip” could be purposefully pandemic-relevant or subconsciously. Many of these darker yet fun songs are engulfed with harsh entanglements of sound (“Set to Destroy”, “Evil in You Makes It Hard”), the vocals barely forcing through like pinholes of language.
Of course there are more light and melodic parts, like “Hashishian”s middle-section of a keyboard sounding like something from long ago, leading into a sleazy bluesy heckler “It’s Weight”. Sometimes I wonder if Albertini is reading thoughts from his journal, or just saying inside jokes with himself: “stop that sinning, boy -- you’re the clean machine.” The rhythmic mixture of guitar riffs patch-working back and forth in “Men Ruin Things” is so satisfying, recalling the sweet quick shifts of Helvetia’s first album A Clever North Wind. One of the most discernible verse-chorus-verse-chorus songs of Sudden Hex nearly ends the tape, “Rose City Park,” with a classic punk drum beat. I piece out fragments of Albertini’s voice, like a hidden anti-message on life: “It just keeps starting over again /// WHO CARES --” The last song, “Face Like a Hat” features uninhibited yowls.
As someone who also tried to write something every day in 2020, I can relate to the abundance of small miracles amongst the throwaways that can appear from this type of creative ritual. Helvetia’s Sudden Hex proves how a messy low-stakes attitude about recording produces art full of strangeness and freedom.