BAND OF THE WEEK: WHITE HILLS

White Hills are the greatest band currently walking the earth. Deal with it.

– OR –

White Hills are more than a band – they’re a way to liberation.

Were it that we believed in ranking and ordering artistic expression, we’d have no problem with prematurely declaring their just-released album, “So You Are … So You’ll Be,” to be our absolute favorite album of the year – the most awe-inspiring, the most intergalactic, the most monolithic, and certainly our favorite.

It’s not simply the consistency of White Hills’ output over the past few years – since 2009 at least, a full-length album each year (and counting), along with an ever-expanding universe of mind-blowing miscellanea – that’s so remarkable.

Rather, it’s the absolute purity of vision demonstrated by the band’s twin-engines of Dave W. (guitar) and Ego Sensation (bass), and whoever else is caught in their orbit at the time of recording. It’s a vision based on limitless possibilities, stern resolve and – no two ways about it – absolutely magickal, molten guitar playing.

It’s a vision demonstrated right there in the title of their latest, and in every second of its fifty-seven and one-half minutes of snarling space sonics. White Hills simply are what they aspire to be. They are a band like absolutely no other, and here’s to their continuing to be.

“So You Are … So You’ll Be” is out now on Thrill Jockey Records. 

“Life with a narrow view is suppressed and constricted; it is a struggle. There is always tension involved in it, because it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep everything in order all the time. If you have a narrow view of life, the disorder of life has to be ordered for you, so you are always busy manipulating the mind and rejecting things or holding on to them …

The spacious mind has room for everything. It is like the space in a room, which is never harmed by what goes in and out of it. In fact, we say ‘the space in this room,’ but actually, the room is in the space, the whole building is in the space. When the building has gone, the space will still be there. The space surrounds the building, and right now we are containing space in a room. With this view we can develop a new perspective. We can see that there are walls creating the shape of the room, and there is the space. Looking at it one way, the walls limit the space in the room. But looking at it another way, we see that space is limitless.”

– Ajahn Sumedho, “Noticing Space”