Hallelujah the Hills + Ho-Ag at Great Scott, April 12, 2008
By CAITLIN E. CURRAN | April 15, 2008
![press_photo_2[1]inside](https://cache.thephoenix.com/secure/uploadedImages/The_Phoenix/Music/Live_Review/press_photo_2[1]inside.jpg "press_photo_2[1]inside")
Hallelujah the Hills |
For a few moments during Hallelujah the Hills’ EP release show on Saturday, everything seemed to dissolve into blissful madness. Members of HTH and Ho-Ag crammed simultaneously, almost comically, onto Great Scott’s tiny stage in a collision of bodies, instruments, blaring sounds and styles. It was the live-band equivalent of a clown car.
“I just want to be known as the guy who stuck an acoustic guitar into Ho-Ag,” said HTH frontman Ryan Walsh. It was a solid description of the resulting music: an odd amalgam of Ho-Ag’s thunderous thrashes with HTH’s Guided by Voices–derived cerebral lo-fi rock.
In their Venn-diagrammed form, the bands (“Hallelujah the Ho-Ag,” as they dubbed themselves) played guitar-clogged, brass-spiked covers of Tom Waits’s “Rain Dogs” and “Telstar,” the hit 1962 instrumental by British surf-rock band the Tornadoes, with space-agey electronic bleeps and occasional leaks of country-twinged guitar. HTH’s Brian Rutledge alternated between trumpet and trombone, Ho-Ag singer Matt Parish clapped his hands in a speedy blur, and maracas exchanged hands fluidly. Drummer Eric Meyer (who splits time between the bands) demonstrated impressive endurance through two consecutive sets (with no break). The whole night was like pizza with pineapple — surprisingly compatible.
HTH, whose seven-song Prepare To Qualify EP was made available for free download last week, write songs that feel familiar and unpretentious. (“Half the songs are anthems, and the other half make you want to dance,” blogger Jami Attenburg has written.) Yet their conceptual, writerly lyrics keep them from edging over to the Dropkicks’ side of the pub-rock continuum. This was apparent, despite the setting (a bar) and audience (beer drinkers), as they faded from Hallelujah the Ho-Ag into plain old HTH, with “Wave Backwards to Massachusetts,” then “Nurses 5 Float Past” (the lead track from Prepare To Qualify). And gradually, for both musicians and audience, there was a bit of room to breathe.
Related:
Winner takes all, Marc Ribot, Do tell, More 
- Winner takes all
Tom Wethern’s house brims with more prizes than the free-toy wing at the Cracker Jack factory.
- Marc Ribot
If you know Ribot only through his brilliant sidemanning with Burnett and Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, you don’t really know Ribot.
- Do tell
The Internet has been an agglomerate of secrets since the first chat room was invented.
- Shriiimp on the Barbie
Shrimp, the edible crustaceans commonly dipped in tart, tangy cocktail sauce, don’t usually carry overtly sexual connotations.
- Dean and Britta
Just as Luna’s final album, Rendezvous (Jetset), was a portrait of a band facing an uncertain demise, Back Numbers is an album about moving on.
- Art and politics
The canny Texas-born songwriter T Bone Burnett hasn’t stepped into the footlights for — at least metaphorically — 14 years now.
- Samuel James and Moses Atwood
The respect these two have for each other’s talent is evident.
- Slideshow: Boston's drag kings
Drag kings are all over the place in Boston.
- Three’s a charm
Muhly, Amidon, and Bartlett are all VT-to-NY transplants and long-time collaborators.
- The Big Hurt: The YouTube anime mystery
YouTube is now so shockingly complete in its catalogue of illegally uploaded music that it's like a cheap jukebox that plays every song, ever.
- Modern vintage
Boston bands Lake Street Dive and Miss Tess and the Bon Ton Parade are different, but with a lot in common.
- Less
Topics:
Live Reviews
, Tom Waits, Brian Rutledge, Eric Meyer
