Hallelujah the Hills are still taking cues from both 1990s lo-fi and ambitious 2000s indie, but they've jumped to the accelerated class on their second album, Colonial Drones. Despite the record opening with the sound of a cello, if that collage art on the album's cover doesn't remind you of Guided by Voices, the rest of the opening track certainly will. "A Guide to the World's Most Fantastic Monsters" picks up on a lesson well learned from GbV-- not bluster or inscrutability, but brevity. It's a hell of a rallying cry for a midtempo opening track, and when the call-and-response comes in, the song really lifts off; not a second is wasted. They pull the same effective trick on "Station", with singer Ryan Walsh's weary double-tracked voice sounding a little more like Conor Oberst than Robert Pollard on that one, which is twice as charming for being half as long as you'd expect.
But the rest of the time-- starting with the quick waltz-time strum of "The Might Come Back Club"-- the band gets down to sounding like real, mature musicians, with Walsh ranting and occasionally bleating out the vivid lyrics he's becoming known for. Walsh's lyrics are less concerned with cramming syllables and sounding "literary" and more about detailed scenes with curious abstractions recurring throughout, which linger in the mind even when the melodies don't. It's an album of haunted minds, ominous figures that could be angels or devils, dreams delivered from character to character, and forgotten boxes of tapes in garages that wind up meaning the difference between life or death.
The music is just as ambitious, but it's much the same ambition heard on many of the most popular indie records of the past few years: the starched-collar strings, the buoyant brass countermelodies, the ranting speak-sung vocals, and, of course, the big crescendos. They're still played tastefully-- the record's most cautious and polite arrangement, "Oxus Pagoda", is its irresistibly melodic. That track has all the strings and horns and syncopated drums set apart by the warm hum of organ underneath; this, and not the number of instruments on the track, shows the band's attention to detail.
While the record's runtime could have been trimmed, the LP does have a welcome diversity, from swaying country-inflected tunes like "Put the Gurus in Charge" and "Classic Tapes" to more tense, layered workouts like "Blank Passports" and "Allied Lions". When coming around to the tooting horns of "Variations on the Grand National Championships" or the slow-motion string plucking of "The Echo Sequence", you may get a creeping jaded feeling at the big crescendos and polite arrangements that have become a calling card for what a lot of people consider indie; of course, people still like those calling cards, and Hallelujah the Hills do them as well as most. The band has more command of that style this time around, and that'll make fans happy and hopefully bring in some more. But the band is good enough, and Walsh is compelling enough as a writer, that they have me wishing they'd step outside of it a little next time.
