Hula- Cut from Inside (Red Rhino RED35) *****
The power of passion of Hula shouldn't be underestimated. Cut from Inside, their second album for Red Rhino, is the pulsating equivalent of the musical sledgehammer reshaping your cranium.
That's not to say that these rhythmic rancheros lack subtlety though; it's in just that department that they succeed. If you have to liken them to anyone - which shouldn't be necessary - they're somewhere in the wilderness between Cabaret Voltaire and The Box but they're burning the undergrowth and surviving on dance-based assaults topped with anarchic guitar, tape loops, keyboards and upfront vocals.
Hula play music from the dark urban landscape but instead of dwelling on the limitations of the genre, they've come in from the cold to supply an adrenalin rush of compassionate courage.
It's revolutionary music inasmuch as it sweats anthem-like slabs of sound with the bravado of a disciplined, decisive hit-group. It's a crunching reminder which underlines, with great gusto, how the average of majority of contemporary music is.
It took me ages to think of anything to write about the LP but numerous plays could only summon up a string of superlatives and sheer surprise at just how 'good' it is. Hula are the perfect cure for the slipshod conditioning that is creeping into music. If you feel yourself being lulled into a false sense of security, just play Cut and regain your self-confidence.

Dave Henderson
Sounds 831203

Hula - Cut from Inside (Red Rhino RED35)
Respect the motivation, suspect the deprivation; in many ways it become not very daring to be daring, especially from the city from whence cutlery comes.
Influences can be like prison bars, and in Sheffield the musical horizon must sometimes seemed defined by the city limits. The traditions, ideas and attitudes that have grown up in the past five or six years must exert an almost irresistible pull on newly developing groups, a magnetic power that people need to be aware of before they can draw away. Hula are, on evidence of this mini album, just another Sheffield group, though that can easily change.
Their problem is that they sound like an inferior reworking of their progenitors and not like Hula. Cut from Inside is, for example, closer to Mk I Clock DVA than anything put out by The Box, who are effectively DVA, in membership if not in a name.
Before looking at Hula's press cuttings I had scribbled down various obvious comparisons with Cabaret Voltaire - only later to find everyone else made the same connections. In fact their earlier Black Pop Workout EP was produced by the Cabs' Stephen Mallinder, and both outfits share the same drummer, Alan Fish.
They are also Chunks of the Pop Group in the Hula soup, and most of all heavy elements Mk I 23 Skidoo; there's the same battering, minimum urban tribalism, a core of mettlesome percussion, shavings and splinterings revolving and colliding on the fringes. It's what used to be called "radical dance music".
This isn't obviously bad, but neither is it obviously good. Hula get excited about things but never excited enough, and seem to be aiming at two different goals without accurate targeting. For a dance group their beat is too lumbering - bottom heavy and solidly unfunky in feel if not in style. And as self-dubbed 'musical terrorists' they are strangely timid. Yes, of course, they get sort of frantic, but never truly fraught with madness; they scramble, but never run as if there were an axeman behind them.
In fact, the difficulty I have listening to Cut from Inside is in finding a reason for doing so beyond the dull workings of 'professional duty'. It is music difficult to crawl inside; jump in and you become lost - side one, to me, sounds like side two.
Hula's underdeveloped melodic sense is a major fault here. This is not such a stupid thing to say, because many of the world's most enlivening musicals adventurers have had it - think of Zoot Horn Rollo's guitar lines, Albert Ayler's marching band themes, Can's lyricism, Cecil Taylor's extravagant melodic clusters
Hula are not extreme enough, they are not gentle enough, but some nebulous blob in-between. And for all that, they may change: I shall return for peeks at irregular intervals...

Lynden Barber
Melody Maker 931119

Hula- Fever Car
Made in Sheffield

Hula, enigmatic scientists of mixed media performance, who have for long been stuck in Sheffield pounding out their own peculiar brand of rhythm'n'noise, seem to have broken away this year and have returned from two Dutch mini-tours to produce their best offering yet - with a little help from their friends.
Fever Car (12" only on Red Rhino) is a blend of hard dance rhythms, layer upon layer of effects, tapes and noises, some slick editing (from Chakk whiz kid Alan Cross), and a screaming chanting vocal line. The effect is so immediate that they've managed to retain all their former experiment and lack of compromise and turn it into a dance that's mindless and fascinating. This is the sort of record you play while you're getting ready to go down to a club and you request once you're there.

Proper Gander zine 1984

Hula - Murmur (Red Rhino RED53) *****
After the rock n' roll anarchy, the positive of both Black Pop Workout and Cut from Inside - Hula's earlier vinyl outings - it was difficult to see which turning the Sheffield trio would take next. Cast rather dismally on the darker, less predictable side of, say, fellow townspeople Cabaret Voltaire and Chakk, Hula had posed a lot questions. But did they had the answers?
The pre album snatch, Fever Car, led you right up the wrong garden path, too. Likable, moving stuff, it made me wonder after a dozen plays if there was much substance behind the dance-driven malice of its rhythm. No such questions No such questions with Murmur. This one has stood the test already.
Throttled in the miserable Sounds office though speakers that weren't fit to grapple its grooves, blasted through cobwebs at home and screeched in the car, Hula are definitely of the new breed.
Jack Barron's revelation that Swans are something important, something to stand up for, something to be awestruck by can only be dittoed for Hula. Here too is that damning aggression, that unkempt power that burning desire. Hula chew fire and spit out brat-skat by the mouthful.
But whereas the whole Sans theory revolves around the roach-happy recesses of the US state of mind, Hula are very , very British. Hula are using their surroundings, their city lights and their greatest nightmares at bright vivid colours.
Murmur is a patchy multi-layered canvas. Within the cracks and crevasses are a thousand stories grasping to escape The Murmur is getting louder, soon it will be a scream.

Dave Henderson
Sounds 841229

Hula-Voice (REDLP75) ***

Like the city that forms their base, Hula are forging ahead with only industry they have mastery of and, as with Sheffield steel, the world is coming to the conclusion that it has no real need for them. Hula are being phased out. "Voice" is Hula's most concerted album yet. After the years and the yards of vinyl, "Voice" sees them finally adopted a recognisable song format. Yet still Hula's most marked characteristic is their lack of focus.

Hula's sound is one of vast impotency. Attempting to marshal a vast array of extreme emotions, and doing so with a musical format as paranoia-typical as this, leads to an innocuous fusion of splintered funk artifacts and ragged cut up lyrics - and it's one that comes desperately close to self parody. As Hula get their heads down and bludgeon away at their tried and trusted, Cabs-pioneered splatter funk, you can't help but feel that this is a terminally short sighted policy. Like devoted artisans working at craft of ages, Hula are being superseded and they don't
even know it.

Hula are slipping slowly but surely into a state of massive disregard and, in the process, achieving something that's been in the music all along: oblivion. Either that or they'll get summer jobs as court musicians on some industrial heritage theme park.
 

Roy Wilkinson

Hula-Threshold (REDLP83/CD) ****

Until the release of the superb Voice earlier this year, Hula had, like their Sheffield soul mates Cabaret Voltaire, been making the perfect indigenous House music, their songs dangerously repetitive tirades that were always unintentionally obscure, directionless and hypnotic. With Voice, Hula demonstrated that they were at least able to focus their considerable talents, finally pinpointing their real targets, the problems of alienation in an industrial setting and the severe social regression experienced by much of the North during the '80s.

On Threshold a retrospective look at Hula's work over the past six years, we see a band in waiting, a group just about to break, from the sedate, lonely electronic murmurings of 1982's Juhnshi through the frenzied percussion of Fever Car and Big Heat to the final crushing blow of Black Wall Blue. It is here that we can observe the transformation of Hula, from the bizarre elitism of their earlier releases to their later position as purveyors of a kind of dynastic magical corruption of northern soul.

At their best - and here you have the best of pre-Voice Hula - Hula are the impassioned pleading of Ron Wright and the never ending, relentless drive of Hula's electronic and percussive mastery. They are the business end of the northern industrialism, and Threshold is their watershed, forcing you into their world of pagan idolatry.

Sam King