4 out of 5

Label: Africantape

Produced by: Colin Marston

A here-and-then-gone grouping of musicians who splashed together jazz free-form and mathy time signatures and post-rock song structures for a puzzling two-song release that definitely sounds like some things you’ve heard while exploring the outer fringes Tzadik, or Hydra Head, or Quarterstick, but also doesn’t exactly sound like any of these. Vocalist Tim Byrnes slightly off-register, shallow vocal is right and wrong at the same time; the music is definitely angular, but also has a rather soothingly acoustic sound – John Fahey fronting a punk band. Somewhere in here, you note that Colin Marston is on production, and there’s a thank-you reference to both Kayo Dot’s Toby Driver and biblical passages, and Hazel-Rah is the main rabbit in Watership Down and… I don’t know, you either tuned out at “jazz free-form and mathy time signatures” or you’re still here.

The jazz leanings of Zu come to mind; the fractured musicality of later-era Don Cab is in there; the application of vocals where vocals simply don’t belong is familiar to some other Africantape artists, like the overly busy Extra Life, but there’s something much more collaborative about Hazel-Rah that it fascinates instead of strictly appealing as an acquired taste.

A-side ‘Behold, A Firewall’ functions as a taste-test of the approach, with an appealingly dramatic syncopated intro getting fitfully matched to Byrnes’ line reading. The lyrics are an interesting puzzle, though, and the “fitful” match makes room for both music and singing, so that while the two sides maybe don’t perfectly sync, they’re not fighting one another for the same space. Color me intrigued.

B-side ‘Stars’ is what sold me, though, as Byrnes’ words work in concert with the music’s rhythm for punctuation, and there’s a bit more grit allowed in as a result – the dual guitars and drums are felt; Hazel-Rah becomes a rock band with avantgarde tendencies instead of the reverse. And with the arguably more accessible B-side, the A-side starts to warm up as well.

Unfortunately, since this was a project seemingly started on a challenge, one suspects that once the challenge was achieved, life took the players elsewhere, and H-R didn’t get to evolve past this point. But I’m glad we got this two song document – it’s worth returning to.