AEM109 Hallelujah the Hills

Albums, posters & other assorted pro­mo­tions for Boston’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-aw-fuck-it-let’s-mic-up-the-sink indie rock band Hal­lelu­jah the Hills all bear the same dis­tinc­tive col­lage style. In it, color and grayscale are mixed freely. Per­spec­tives crash into one another, cre­at­ing a mind­fuck of Escher-esque inten­sity, only with­out that cute, logic-puzzle ele­ment of res­o­lu­tion. Pho­tographs and draw­ings and com­puter graph­ics join forces to cre­ate sin­gle fig­ures. Ragged edges show. Enor­mous pen­cils rain down on a boat that looks to have arrived directly from a renais­sance paint­ing. A man drowns another in a pond next to what looks sort of like a filled in mul­ti­ple choice test. Sci­en­tists cribbed from a tech­ni­color film still point to a hand drawn arrow. Stray ink splotches show around the let­ters that make up the band name, rem­nants from stamps. It’s loose and sur­real and unpre­dictable, but it some­how man­ages to sus­tain a con­sis­tent mood: an eerie melange of pulp nov­els, play­ful non-sequitors, con­spir­acy the­o­ries and David Lynch’s nau­seous unre­al­ity, tem­pered with the occa­sional moment of beau­ti­ful clar­ity. It’s one of the things I’ve always admired about Hal­lelu­jah the Hills, because it man­ages to be a per­fect illus­tra­tion of what the band sounds like. Rough-edged, sur­real, funny, eerie, packed with lyrics that sound like they were lifted from a pam­phlet run off in someone’s base­ment, and dot­ted with those moments of epiphany (said epipha­nies being cre­ated by inge­nious arrang­ing touches and/or stir­ring, shouted cho­ruses). For exam­ple, there’s the moment in “Allied Lions” (a track from the bands most recent album, Colo­nial Drones) in which a frothy, build­ing rock song sud­denly dis­ap­pears, leav­ing the line everything’s a dream except for this moment we’re in now hang­ing over the void, the lyric bro­ken into three equal parts with audi­bly dif­fer­ent effects on each, collage-style. Then an alarm clock rings.

The art and the songs are both the prod­uct of the mind of lead singer Ryan Walsh, for­merly of  The Stairs, though the arrang­ing is done by the full band together, who between the seven of them can cover all the usual rock band bases with the addi­tion of trum­pet, trom­bone, cello and sam­pler. The arrange­ments are often what cat­a­pult the songs out of the realm of rock-with-smart-and-weird-lyrics into a fully formed, coher­ent, mood-inducing sound, com­plete with the occa­sional epic crescendo, for which, as we all know by now, I am a grade A sucker. Take their Ampeater B-side “That Tick­ing Sound You Hear,” which com­mences with some min­i­mal two-note gui­tar strum­ming, the gen­tlest mallet-struck cym­bals, and a cas­cad­ing melody frag­ment that’s Walsh at his soft­est and most lyri­cal. After mak­ing a brief appear­ance ear­lier, muted trum­pet and cello appear to punc­tu­ate the lines out of con­text / on a sub­stance with star­tling clus­ters that dis­ap­pear just as fast as they arrived. Like Shai Erlichman’s songs, the moment is mem­o­rable for what it leaves out (the par­al­lel clus­ters that don’t appear after the next two lines) as for what it con­tains. Soon after­ward there is a ris­ing, dis­cor­dant gui­tar and trum­pet trill which dies into a found sound squeal which abruptly breaks into a bridge that sounds tailor-made for some pound­ing drums and enor­mous gui­tars. Instead, we get more high pitched noises and arhyth­mic cym­bals that fight the core of the song in a way that makes its omi­nous lyrics all the more omi­nous, and the full band crash we’d expect is reserved for the very last repeat­ing cho­rus, where its anthemic poten­tial runs up against the fact that the last repeat­ing cho­rus is built in elu­sive five-bar phrases. The arrange­ment is bril­liant because “Tick­ing” isn’t a song that should soar. It’s the lament of a con­spir­acy the­o­rist who’s either cor­rect or bat­shit crazy, and either way things aren’t going to turn out well. Even in the last moments of the song, when the vocals have landed safely on the root, the ten­sion remains in the trum­pet, which hangs on the major 7 and refuses to resolve upwards the way our west­ern ears want it to.

Walsh’s lyrics are full of bril­liant and rhyth­mic one-liners like the mas­ter painters all look ashamed / they don’t know the thrill of a juke­box fade, which call to mind the non sequiturs of The Sil­ver Jews’ David Berman, with whom Hal­lelu­jah the Hills has shared bills (and shares some styl­is­tic mark­ers), only steeped in dis­as­ter movies instead of wry, cow­boy tough­ness, and John Ash­bery poems instead of whiskey. This atten­tion to words (I have it on good author­ity that Walsh has been known to per­form “Google Purity tests,” a con­cept coined and invented by Berman which involves search­ing for lyri­cal ideas to make sure that they are entirely original) pays off in spades, for where most bands in the indie rock world get stuck explor­ing the same ideas with the same words and mak­ing them sound cool via loud gui­tars or some such, Hal­lelu­jah the Hills’s lyrics are full of cou­plets that are clever and funny and touch­ing and use words that you have prob­a­bly not recently heard in a rock song, like, say, doc­u­men­tar­ian or cohorts, with­out sac­ri­fic­ing any of the rhythm that lyrics have to have to carry a rock song. AND they have loud gui­tars. What more could you ask for?

A-side “Intro­duc­tory Saints” (another clas­sic Hal­lelu­jah the Hills title) show­cases the less moody side of the band, lay­ing those propul­sive lyrics over a bouncy back­beat, gar­nished with some some light coun­try (those twangy lead lines over in your left ear, the way the melody dips from the root up an octave at the end of the cho­rus, that last ring­ing major 6 chord) and soul-pop touches (organ smears, those repeat­ing gui­tar stabs in your right ear, the fat brass long­tones), and end­ing in the Hal­lelu­jah the Hills sta­ple of an enor­mous, rous­ing gang-vocal cho­rus (some­thing about Walsh’s tre­bly voice becomes elec­tric when he jumps up the octave into a shout at a cli­mac­tic moment; it always gets me, (you can also hear it leap­ing out from the gang vocal mix on Titus Andron­i­cus’ The Mon­i­tor). From the first line, this song really brings out the way Walsh’s lyrics fit together just loosely enough to leave end­less space open for poten­tial mean­ing. The open­ing cou­plet of Gen­tle­men / he said for­ever opens so many pos­si­bil­i­ties it’s easy to project your own mean­ings onto it, some­thing that’s so often true of his songs.

Hal­lelu­jah the Hills have released these two songs to cel­e­brate their depar­ture on a sum­mer tour open­ing for Titus Andron­i­cus (who mem­bers of Hills will also be join­ing onstage to pro­vide cello, brass, keys and gang vocals), a one two punch you’d be wise to check out. With so many mem­bers, Hal­lelu­jah The Hills have the abil­ity live to cre­ate an enor­mous, euphoric wall of sound, espe­cially when all of the mem­bers are not only play­ing at top vol­ume but shout­ing a big, uni­son hook that hangs over the entire room. You’ll find it hard not to feel the upward pull of those enor­mous clouds of melody, and it will bring a lit­tle joy to your heart.

Tour dates
July 8 – All­ston, MA – Great Scott
July 9 – Brook­lyn, NY – Union Hall
July 10 – New Haven, CT – Lily’s Pad*
July 11 – Northamp­ton, MA – Pearl Street*
July 12 – Albany, NY – Valentine’s*
July 13 – Buf­falo, NY – Ninth Ward at Babeville*
July 14 – Toronto, ON – Horse­shoe Tav­ern*
July 15 – Grand Rapids, MI – Inter­sec­tion Lounge*
July 16 – Chicago, IL – Sub­ter­ranean*
July 18 – Youngstown, OH – Lemon Grove Cafe
* = Open­ing for Titus Andronicus

Gabe Birn­baum

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