VIDEO: Hallelujah the Hills, "Wave Backwards to Massachusetts"
To file Hallelujah the Hills under “literary rock” would be, according to frontman Ryan Walsh, an insult to literature and an insult to rock. Several facts belie this claim. My first exposure to Walsh and HtH came a bunch of months back at a reading of James Joyce’s dirty letters at Great Scott. “Be my whore, my mistress, my dark blue rain drenched flower,” Walsh read. It wasn’t till later in the night that he actually played. He doesn’t look like the typical indie-rocker — with his Sunday-morning-messy hair, he’s built like a dude who could give a good hug. I might’ve been the only one in the room who didn’t already know who he was, who HtH were, but it was good to find out.
This was more than a year after the break-up of the Stairs, a group who included Walsh and current HtH (and Ho-Ag) drummer Eric Meyer. The rose-from-the ashes cliché doesn’t apply. If anything, HtH rose out of the just-ignited fire of the Stairs; it was only as they announced their break-up that they started getting attention. “Typical Boston,” says Meyer, who has a drummer’s pair of muscled shoulders and a palpable restlessness. He’s sitting to my left at the Irish Village in Brighton on a wet night, the eve of the release of HtH’s outstanding first album, Collective Psychosis Begone (Misra). “A non-truth began that we were beloved,” says Walsh of the Stairs. “We were playing for nobody.” Meyer and Walsh teamed with cellist David Bentley, bassist Joe Marrett, trumpeter Brian Rutledge, and Moog synthist, organist, and guitarist Elio DeLuca. The band play Great Scott again this Saturday.
There are other literary links. HtH wrote a version of “Monster Eyes,” a song in Jonathan Lethem’s recent rock novel You Don’t Love Me, and they performed after a Lethem reading to a packed Coolidge Corner Theatre. They judged a raunchiest-passage reading at Brookline Booksmith. In e-mails, Walsh quotes poet John Ashbery, art critic Jerry Saltz, and Carl Jung. And that’s not to mention the actual lyrics.
“Part of the attraction of this band is the lyrics of Ryan,” says Bentley, who has a Southerner’s ability to sound warm and well-mannered even when he’s swearing. “It’s fucking wordy stuff. He uses a lot of uncommon language.”
But the band shouldn’t be reduced to the words, says an ardent DeLuca, the most recent addition to HtH, a mischievous-looking guy with a flop of hair on top, glasses, sharp sideburns. And he’s right about the danger of caging the band in a literary-rock rubric. The delicate, precise, bizarre images from “Wave Backwards to Massachusetts” — “Keep an eye on the loggers preparing for battle/And textbooks glow like they know where we’re going”; “a cat with a wind-chime skeleton” — don’t inspire reflection. They’re more likely to get people on their feet and dancing, because there’s an energy and an urgency that’s of a piece with the music, when the drums are going, and the trumpet, and — hey! they’re singing about Massachusetts!
What’s more, HtH balance words and music in a way that’s uncommon for bands with a literary bent. The Decemberists, for one, write cloying, over-clever lyrics that subordinate the music. “Sleeper Agent (Just Waking Up),” the first song on Collective Psychosis Begone, opens with the line “A test train rolls in at three in the morning.” Walsh slurs “morning” just enough to capture the solitude of the hour, and the draw of Bentley’s cello bow is an equal voice in the mood.
Neutral Milk Hotel are the band they’re most often compared with, and it’s an apt pairing. “It’s something in the air,” says Bentley, “the fanaticism of the music. They’re a really fanatic band, and we try to get that feeling across too.” It’s fast music for people who like slow, sad songs.
“We’re good at telling each other when elements are and aren’t working,” says Rutledge. That augurs well for their first East Coast/Midwest tour, as well as for their vow to put out 33 records before they’re done. “One album every few years is annoying,” says Walsh. “And I don’t want to be releasing albums when I’m 50,” says Meyer. “Really?” says Walsh, in a way that suggests he’s in it for the long haul.
That kind of collaboration on the sound doesn’t take place with the lyrics. “It’s one of the few things we don’t really touch,” says Rutledge. When writing, Walsh doesn’t over-analyze; interpretation comes later. He mentions how David Byrne wanted to write a “nonsense song” with “Burning Down the House” and felt he failed because of the response the song got. “That’s a beautiful story," Walsh says. "I think it’s pretty amazing that our subconscious, or the power of language itself, has the ability to trump our intentions.” A couple of days after our interview, Walsh sends an e-mail explaining that the title of the album had just become clear to him.
