As part of his "Promiscuous Materials" project, author (and EMP conference keynote presenter) Jonathan Lethem made available on his website the lyrics to several partially completed songs he'd been stowing away for the past 20 years, for musicians to adapt however they liked. Boston sextet Hallelujah the Hills took the scant text of Lethem's "Monster Eyes" ("Can you feel my eyes abhor you?/ Better run, better run") and turned it into a somewhat creepy lo-fi dirge, debuting the completed song at Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Mass.
The collaboration was a fitting first foray into the public eye for HtH, whose debut album Collective Psychosis Begone reveals a group clearly inclined toward the bookish end of the musical spectrum. A verse-ending lyric from the breathlessly delivered "fight song" that doubles as the band's name underscores its academic accent: "made inventions, broke conventions/ Raised a glass to new pretensions/ meta-meta-meta-and the novel is dead. Literary existentialism aside, "HtH" (the song)'s exuberant horns and strings combine with its reference-desk references to position HtH (the band) in the Venn diagram overlap between the two most currently prominent strains of Anglo-ethnic indie rock. The band's ensemble structure (cello, trumpet, and melodica) and learned lyricism echoes the stage-packing sounds of Arcade Fire, Danielson, Bright Eyes, and Decemberists, while its shambolic, maximalist barroom aura recalls Robert Pollard, another songwriter infrequently at a loss for words.
Anyone even slightly familiar with Pollard will recognize his influence on Ryan Walsh's songwriting. The lyric "let's all plug in to the telepathic disco," which feels traced from Pollard's handbook of power-pop processionals, marks a minor crescendo in album-opener "Sleeper Agent"; triggering strings to swell, a gang of voices to appear, and temporarily expanding the song into a barroom singalong, perhaps for a pub full of creative writing majors just finished with finals. It gives way to what is easily the album's best song; the irresistable "Wave Backward to Massachusetts". Feeling like an excerpt from Alien Lanes or Under the Bushes, Under the Stars, "Wave" exhibits Walsh's similar (if not quite as ingratiating) knack for crafting fist-pumping anthems from absurdist word clusters. Don't think he's unaware of this, either: on its way toward yet another raved-up, string-laden ending, slow-burner "The House Is All Lit Up" offers that "non-sequiturs built this nation."
While never again reaching the giddy level of "Wave", Collective does tackle a wide variety of subject matter. "Effie's On the Other Side" is the most melodic morgue-robbing tale you'll hear all year, and the Golden Age ode "It's All Been Downhill Since the Talkies Started to Sing" sets a film-studies fever dream atop fuzzed-out guitar. The extended freak-out coda sticks around for about two minutes too long; like Pollard and so many college seminar papers, Collective could use an editor in places (the song titles, perhaps, and the over-used horns), and at times comes across as a collection of citations without a balance of original vision. As a first draft of Hallelujah the Hills' future potential, however, it's definitely worth a bit of polish.
