Blues, Hollers and Hellos

Blues, Hollers and Hellos
EP by The Red Krayola
Released	October 9, 2000
Recorded
Studio
Label	Drag City
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Track listing

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Container of Drudgery" (Never Had a Name)	16:47
2.	"Magnificence as Such"	9:10
3.	"Is There?"	3:53
4.	"6-5-3 Blues" (Blues 6)	4:11
5.	"6-5-3 Blues" (Blues 5)	1:31
6.	"6-5-3 Blues" (Blues 3)	5:33

Credits

None listed

Speculated performers

• Mayo Thompson - vocals, guitar
• Tom Watson - guitar
• John McEntire - drums
• David Grubbs
• Stephen Prina

Cover art

• Photography: unknown
• Design by Christopher Williams

Retrospectives

Mayo Thompson, 2005

When Blues, Hollers And Hellos first came out in 2000 someone described it as being 'artless'. Well first the steam came out of my ears when I read that. But after I thought about it for a while I realised the guy's right. It's a perfection description. It is artless, it's just musical information, the shaping is barely there, just tentative enough, and the intensity with which it's played and the quality of feeling, the atmosphere I look for in lyrics, it's all artless. And that's exactly what those early records were all about.

Reviews

Earpeace

Fall 2000

thanx to rian from drag city for sending this...i am still dealing with this 41 minute, 6 song cd-ep, trying to absorb and assimilate it at some level. it is certainly referent to blues forms, sometimes by melodic phrases, more so in the space around the guitar and drums core. no personnel are listed, tho the accompanying promo sheet credits christopher williams for the cover art. my best educated guess would be that joining mayo thompson are george hurley on drums (could be john mcintyre, but sounds like the former minutemen drummer to me), david grubbs as musical director-guitar (a safe bet, since grubbs is co-billed on the tour dates announced thus far), tom watson guitar-ringer (hasn't missed a krayola recording in a few years) and longtime co-conspirator albert oehlen on synthesizer/electronic percussion/noises (see van oehlen review). the record starts out with the southern-referencing, languid guitars and drum exercises. extremely self-conscious, seems as tho the songwriting/recording process itself is being examined. this seems to continue the changes incorporated in fingerpainting, principally in the turning away from the collaborative voices and smoothly arranged songs of 1998's hazel. this one is cleaner-sounding than fingerpainting, which incorporated recordings done over the previous 30+ years. by the 3rd song, "is there?", the synth and electronic percussion begin to interpose themselves. some of the sounds recall 1989's malefactor, ade (recently reissued on drag city), while others bring to mind a techno record playing in the next room, with only tenuous connections to the guitars and vox. the work here is evocative of notes on the making of a new red krayola record. i am enjoying contemplating the riddle of the pieces of this puzzle.

Rock Obrobje

Janez Golič

Chicago Reader

September 9, 2004

[...] the Krayola’s sole constant member told writer Richie Unterberger that “we want to be dissidents of the people to whom we should most propitiously belong.” Sometimes that approach is disastrous–on the 2000 release Blues, Hollers and Hellos (Drag City), the band deliberately deprives the songs of resolution with out-of-tempo drumming and anticlimactic noodling, and doesn’t offer anything to make up for the loss.

Drag City

2005

Strike an attitude and it will strike you back. By the time the band got to “Blues Hollers and Hellos” the energy that came from the return to America, the new label, the new cohort, the new spirit, was spent. “Blues” was abstract realism. It played in a back room of a world without art, a world where art can only be what you call what you made when you did what you could, if you did. And they did. So it was. And so it is, and probably ever will be.