Hallelujah The Hills

Considering it’s a free download, [Prepare To Qualify] is remarkably good and elegantly demonstrates just why the band’s debut album won such high praise last year.

Rarely do entire albums translate successfully as live setlists, but Hallelujah the Hills proved that their debut Collective Psychosis Begone is an exception to the rule Saturday night at the Middle East Upstairs. Breezing through the ebbs and flows of the excellent album like grizzled veterans, Ryan Walsh and his bandmates treated the crowd to a commanding performance.

The band has evolved from a jumbled batch of demos on frontman Ryan Walsh’s walkman to a real live six-man effort and is right now performing with the orchestration of a small theatre ensemble, switching gears from scrappy Robert Pollard rock to patient set pieces that hinge on cello plucking and delicately unfolding lyrics.

On its debut for Misra Records, local supergroup Hallelujah the Hills wavers between ‘Summerteeth’-era Wilco...and a powerful '70s psychedelic blitz.

It's the bookish end of things we're hearing on this stellar, non-album cut from HtH, singer Ryan Walsh delivering a positively Bright Eyed turn on the slow rolling ‘Let It Wave.’

[Collective Pyschosis Begone]...is as bracingly adventurous and exuberant, as crowded with a palpable sense of joy and discovery, as anything you're likely to hear this year. It's the sound of music without limits, made by a band reveling in its own vast creative potential and the cumulative collision of its early influences.

To a world where logic and wonder so often converge, Hallelujah the Hills provides a warm and welcome soundtrack.

There’s something intimate about this album — it feels as if you’re in a room with these guys, and they laugh at your jokes, and they play a few songs, and you applaud, then you all go out and get drunk together.

A child reading a poem, a throat clearing, a voice altering microphone treatment, all these things are slipped in without much explanation, but also without pretense. The whole record is beautifully odd, more than a little off even when it’s just one person with a guitar…so how could a few real world sounds make it any stranger?

Musically, for a ragged group without a consistent image...Hallelujah The Hills have a considerable amount of chemistry. Too new to be jaded, they seem to actually enjoy performing on stage. Numbers like ‘Wave Backwards To Massachusetts,’ ‘Hallelujah The Hills,’ and ‘Slow Motion Records Broken at Break Neck Speeds’ showcased their ability to combine joyful, playful, and intelligent all within the same number.

It’s a ramshackle, lo-fi, amateurish indie mess, but Walsh’s off-kilter David Byrne warble and the band’s unerring pop sensibilities combine to forge something that is both accessible and bracing.

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.