Boston’s Hallelujah The Hills are a band which seem to create according to similar aims and aspirations. Ryan H. Walsh and Co. release detailed, carefully-written albums without ruining their status as a bona fide rock band, their songs resonating on an emotional level irrespective of whether or not the listener wants to delve into the more cerebral aspects. The band went a good way to nailing the complicated/fun trade-off on 2014’s Have You Ever Done Something Evil?, a record we described as “good-time rock and roll with a weird edge”, but their new release, A Band is Something to Figure Out, sees the formula refined once more. Here the dichotomy has been stapled back together, the songs no longer working on several levels but rather across wide open vistas, accessible and interesting simultaneously. Even the most abstract lyrics feel important on an subconscious level. This is an album built from symbolism (one of the tags on Bandcamp is ‘hieroglyphics’, to give you an idea) but, like all the best mysteries, a sense of significance floats to the top, independent of any hidden code.

This intuitive meaning is present from the off. The album’s opener ‘What Do The People Want’ is a rousing, strangely emotional, indie rocker which proceeds with a tone that can only be termed bewildered hope. What the people actually want is never made clear, though they experiment with a multitude of strange situations in an attempt to find out, “calling the M’s from the dictionary” and “telling jokes in the ossuary” and “waving backwards to Massachusetts / trying to win the ‘World’s Best Haunt’©” (itself reference to a song from their début, Collective Psychosis Begone). There’s a real feeling of disorientation here but it never feels isolating. Rather it seems uniting, a force of perplexment so ubiquitous it has become a source of solidarity. ‘We Have The Perimeter Surrounded’ follows in emphatic manner, a song which raises a number of questions. Such as: Does Woody Guthrie dream of punk bands? Do the FBI chase indie rock musicians? In the blur between reality and fiction, a postmodern confusion reigns, though the celebratory, earnest tone (which is positively nostalgic by the midway mark) is set it apart from the usual paranoid sort of deal.

“Woody
Guthrie
once had
a weird dream
he fronted
a punk band
called Exed Out
they were amazing
every single thing that I could think of
we have the perimeter surrounded”

Full of catchy hooks, ‘The Mountain That Wanted More’ tells of a modern dissatisfaction where even the grandest, most impressive, among us are victims to a constant desire for more, and ‘The Girl With Electronics Inside’ sounds like a 90s indie hit written by George Saunders, a man/machine love song whose Big Feeling instrumental section suggests a complete lack of irony. ‘Spin the Atoms’ is slow and slinky and cartoonish in the Pynchonian sense, the background whirring bleep sounding like some covert analysis in a deep desert bunker, before ‘I’m in the Phone Book, I’m On the Planet, I’m Dying Slowly’ provides a pretty succinct summation of what its like to be alive. The song finds its characters bumping through life yet seized by a chemically assisted pseudo-wisdom, their conclusions (the title/chorus) morbid and moving and monstrous enough for decisive action (“a ritual in a Motel 6 / to make us one, at least for a night… Let me lay my hands on top of glowing spheres of endless light!”).

‘Play it as it Loops’ is a metafictional oddity for the time of instant gratification while ‘Hassle Magnet’ is heavy and relentless, the instrumentation and vocals rattling toward distortion. The track can be heard in various ways – the neurotic interior of a blank faced citizen, a cryptographic bulletin from an enigmatic sect, the ravings of some brain-fried wacko – though those of you with energy, time and grey matter will probably find clear threads leading elsewhere within the Hallelujah the Hills labyrinth. ‘New Phone Who Dis’ emerges with surprising tenderness, a song which sounds like the lone voice in a desolate expanse of digital echoes and cyber-ghosts, a person stripped and scorched by the constant beam of information yet still trying to maintain a sense of pride and an openness to connection:

“you now know
there’s a code word for you in the files

it’s certainly been awhile
the parts of me you reviled
have all been removed
but I didn’t do it for you

new phone who dis?”

‘The Dangers Are Doubled’ sees a return to the celebratory tone, Walsh’s words riding the crest of bright instrumentation and taking pleasure in absurd details and ambiguities, while ‘Realistic Birthday Music’ is carried by a similar energy. Returning to the themes of fiction vs. truth, the track crosses the wires of image and reality to paint a mimetic scene of the 21^st century. Here the characters are trying to act with sincerity according to what they’ve seen on screen, their ideas of human connection coloured or constructed by televisual representations of those very things.

“i’ve seen this in a movie
but never without a soundtrack of folk music
to coax and guide me toward your bed

And I’m coming at you with realistic birthday music
i’m coming at you with my hands above my head
And I’m coming at you with realistic birthday music
you’ve heard this song before
you’ve heard this song before”

There’s a lot of postmodern confusion present on A Band is Something to Figure Out but Hallelujah the Hills are not a postmodern band. Rather they are post-postmodern, reconstructing the human experience through sheer enthusiasm, using their joyous hooks and choruses as earnest expressions of emotion rather than ironic juxtapositions.  Walsh and Co. aren’t sitting us down to share a smirk and a wink, or to reel off some abstract philosophical theories, but rather taking us by the hand and running through their strange world, leaving it up to us to catch something meaningful in the breathless blur. And what a world this is, one which has been evolving since their first album, an ecosystem based on a strange molecule – twin strands of confusion and intuition tightly bound and swirled into a double helix – the DNA of Hallelujah the Hills.

You can buy A Band is Something to Figure Out now from the Hallelujah The Hills Bandcamp page.

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“Best Boy is for the children of the 80s and 90s, reminiscing about the age where entertainment exploded, where VHS tapes and cable TV transformed us into constant consumers… a wistful celebration of what we had [which] presents some convincing reasons for why we feel the way we do”

Pace is back with a double A-side single which may or may not have been recorded at The Rolling Stones Mobile Recording Unit with the help of “a murderers’ row of jazz ­fusion session talent” including Bill “Church” Wellington (keyboards), Du’vel DiGiorgio (bass), Coke Stevenson (trumpet), Tony Kukoc (soprano guitar) and Dan Van Dyke (drums), the non-fictitious Lira Yin (vocals) and producer Matt LeMay. The release sees Pace expand on the new direction hinted at on Best Boy, pushing toward a more expansive, poppy sound. As he explains:  

To paraphrase REO Speedwagon, badly, it was ‘time for me to [spread my wings and] fly, musically. I don’t really play live these days. I have a young family. I exclusively buy bargain bin progressive and AOR records. I recently got really into tennis. In other words, I like to push the boundaries, and I may as well use all of these things to help  inform and craft my new songs.

The release opens with ‘The Flood’, giving the first taste of the new boundary-pushing Child Actors. Opening with sparkling synths, the track develops into a jubilant pop song which finds glory in a seemingly miserable/dangerous life (the opening line, for example: “Here comes the drugs wash over me/their wake will take us out to sea”). Right up to the final triumphant horns and keyboards, the track does not let up in its elation, pushing a Hold Steady brand of transcendental joy/love, the sort which creeps through the cracks of a life filled with high stakes and morning afters.

“Here come the drums, rain over me stuttering start of the daylight dawning
fathers yell and mothers weep crawl on our knees soon enough we’re walking shed a tear at ‘Hey Nineteen’ another love crashed in-between

Open the floodgates, cut us loose then we’ll catch our stride
Close your eyes and stay by my side the realest thing that you can do tonight”

Second single ‘Red Sauce Revisited’ combines the various ingredients of radio hits from through the ages, opening with 60s surf strums and touching upon 70s rock solos, 80s power pop cheese and 90s melodrama to become a four and a half minute singalong homage to the good old FM stations of the US of A.

“Signs are on the ceiling, writing’s on the wall
There’s a terrifying feeling I won’t see you anymore
and I cannot stop the bleeding so I’ll learn to love the pain
I never thought that this is how it ends”

So basically, if you like your music large and loud and lively, the kind of great so-serious-its-not (or maybe so non-serious-its-serious) energy that should be filmed for a live concert VHS-special, look no further. Michael Pace has arrived, and he has company.

The Flood / Red Sauce Revisited is available for download on a pay-what-you-can basis via Bandcamp.

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Tierpark are the latest act to emerge from this talent pool. Self-described as a “dreamgaze noise rock” band, the outfit draw upon a wide range of influences to create an experimental brand of post-rock. With complex rhythms, peculiar time signatures and a disregard for common conventions, the band produce songs of surprising intricacy without moving too far from the accessible pop/rock template, allowing the listener a way in to their strange dreamscapes. Their latest album, The Moment Two Worlds Meet, is out later this month, and we are delighted to share the second track with you now.

‘Shadow Play [그림자림그]’ is a perfect example of Tierpark’s atypical style. Think a mix of the idiosyncratic art-rock of Dirty Projectors and the eccentricity of Bjork, with post-rock overtones and a Minus The Bear-style mathy tinge, and you are getting somewhere near pinning down the sound. The vocals have shades of recent favourite Bells Atlas, adding a further texture to what is already a vivid track, and despite being an ignorant Westerner with no knowledge of Korean, Sehee Kim’s lyrics and delivery provide more than enough to convey the general concept behind the song. Have a listen below:

The Moment Two Worlds Meet is set to be released on the 20th September. You can pre-order it now via the Tierpark Bandcamp page.

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This self-titled release is Island Eyes’ first album, and fans of Janzen’s previous work will be pleased to find that he is still crafting exciting, experimental pop/rock music that incorporates a range of instruments and electronics. An obvious comparison is Spencer Krug’s Moonface output, especially earlier releases like Organ Music and Heartbreaking Bravery, although both acts are distinctive and unusual and probably share less in common than the majority of conventional bands.

The artwork goes some way to describing the themes and atmosphere on offer on Island Eyes, a mystical blend of nature and obscure, mythological imagery packed onto an island surrounded by sea. The narrative across the album has the feel of a classic quest – a pursuit of love, noble or otherwise, which begins on the very opening track:

“There’s a wind in my heart
There’s a sword in the air, on the ocean
I lay down, waiting for someone to love”

The entire album could be interpreted from this perspective, an epic captured in the protagonist’s poetic words or thoughts as he’s propelled across land and life by the voice and hands of his love (“As the morning sun wakes the sleeping wolves / I’ll be in your room; I’ll be in your home” continues ‘Pale Moon’). However, the odyssey is not a Hollywood movie with heroic deeds and happy endings. Instead it’s littered with confusion and menace, ominous imagery invoking random violence of nature and other forces, clear narrative replaced by the intuitive jumble of a dream. ‘Every House Is On Fire’ opens with a drum machine reminiscent of Handsome Furs and dives straight into the aforementioned unsettling imagery:

“I heard your voice inside the room
As all your storming clouds came in for you
I called your name, I called on high
But everybody’s houses are on fire

I won’t run, I won’t hide
In the dark of the night
Now I know, you were right
I’ll remain in the light of the sun”

If the first half of the album channelled a weird fantasy world then the second becomes dreamier still, as titles such as ‘You Had a Dream About Love’ and ‘October Mirage’ suggest. The latter again returns to the imagery of islands and swords, all shrouded in an oneiric fog like some fever dream of a would-be hero:

“To dream of the sea
Where I’m washed to the shore
With the clouds coming in
Like the waters before
I lift up my voice
To the ruinous waves
For the lights that once shone
Are beginning to fade”

The strange thing is that as things get weirder, you get the impression that the album is not really an epic at all. Or rather, it is an epic metaphor, an extended attempt to convey the modern-day feelings of the narrator through grand, legendary means. And the narrator could very well be Janzen himself – maybe the island in question Vancouver Island, the sea the Pacific ocean or the Strait of Georgia? What once seemed an interesting and magical tale becomes something more meaningful and unsettling: ‘Throw My Ashes Off the Pier’ deals with the admittedly morbid yet very real/common musings on how you want your loved ones to continue after your death (“O will you wait for me after I disappear? Or will you throw, will you throw all my ashes off of this pier, O my dear?”), while ‘Over Waves’ ends the release on an uncomfortable but cathartic note. “O I’m afraid of this heart,” Janzen sings, the track relatively bare in comparison to the electronic layers of the others, “I’m afraid of your ghost, I’m afraid of your love”. Here he confronts the uncertainty of every life, admitting his fear about pretty much every possible scenario while finding solace in the fact that this uncertainty binds us all.

Whether you want to listen to a fantasy, or a reality that can only be conveyed through the fantastic, this album will not disappoint. Island Eyes is out now via Legwarmer Records. You can grab a rather fetching cassette (see below) from the Island Eyes Bandcamp page.

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