Hot Wax: Veda Hille’s This Riot Life

The full version of this review appears in the pages of TRACER Magazine.

Maybe I’m not accustomed to art-rock, and maybe I just don’t get it. Fine, but if you’re like me and you’re into music that offers consistent melodies that demand more from your sense of hearing than your, shall we say, encyclopedic lexicon of spiritual-journey musings, Veda Hille’s new album, This Riot Life, isn’t for you. Is there a guitar somewhere in there? Yes, but it’s buried, and lives in the background, with the barely audible drums. Are there more orchestral moments and dramatic vocals, often spoken rather than sung here? Yes. There is a heavy dose of insight on topics such as “heaven and earth,” a “love divine,” “Emmanuel,” and “the kid of God”. But the music is troubling, and not pleasing to the ear, although that could be because I demand a certain amount of formality from my songs when it comes to their structure. This Riot Life offers a cascade of tunes that sound like the orchestra’s sheet music for a community theater’s latest experimental play.

So, that being said, obviously I found very little to get excited about when it comes to Veda Hille. I’ve read plenty of praise in doing research for this review, but “I will not martyr” when it comes to this album. The album opener, “Lucklucky,” has a promising musical palette – plucking on a violin, which to my ears sounds like a West African mbira or finger piano instead of a violin – very nice, steady yet light percussion, a defiant horn part, and intriguing lyrics, e.g. “There is the place you know / there is the place you don’t know…there is where I did this, there is where I did that / It took thirty years to draw this map.” However, on the rest of the album there is nary a song that is similar to “Lucklucky,” not lyrically, vocally, or musically.

Veda Hille and her cohorts on this album, a 12-piece “band” (re: orchestra), plies the listener with life’s bigger questions and music that is composed seemingly with the goal of broadening your horizons. She actually demands that you “Grab your coat and your popular music / We’re taking it to the streets.” The high-energy “Ace Of The Nazarene,” sounds too much like a mega-church sing-a-long complete with lines that ruminate on searching for life’s meaning through “Christ,” accompanied by violin, light, (though pounding now) drums and bass, and the arguably off-key sound of Hille’s voice. She has been compared to art-pop musicians Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco, but I have to say those comparisons ring true only compared with her emotional and cerebral gravitas and piano, Amos’ mode of musicianship, and the soliloquy-esque vocal stylings that are DiFranco’s m.o. Beyond that, I believe Amos and DiFranco have produced material, even on their early albums, that for their musical originality, songwriting skills, and lyrical takes on introspection and ethereal revelations in a modern world far surpass the light, boppity, faith-centric, theatrical sound of Veda Hille on This Riot Life.

Amanda Carnes