There is a certain sense of security in owning a vehicle that only holds two people: when you’re always the one driving, it follows that you always know who has been in your car. There’s also a very uncertain dose of strangeness involved in everyday life, and at times even the most logical equations don’t hold true. Ryan Walsh is well acquainted with this sense of the strange: One day, he reached into the passenger-side pocket of his two-seater truck and found a CD by a band he’d never heard of.

“I had no idea how it got there, and I asked all of the people who’d been in my car, and everyone was saying no,” Walsh says. “I listened to it, and I loved it.”

He never did find out who left the disc in his car, but he learned quite a bit about the band, Frog Eyes. Soon after the album’s mysterious appearance in his life, Walsh’s own band, Hallelujah the Hills, was offered a choice of two shows at TT the Bear’s in his hometown of Boston. One was an opportunity to open for Frog Eyes.

Whether one calls them fate or just a happy coincidence, these events led to the eventual release of Hallelujah the Hills’s debut album Collective Psychosis Begone on Misra Records this summer. “I sent a poster from that show along with our demo to Cory [Brown] at Absolutely Kosher and he wrote me back and said they were interested,” Walsh notes. “When the album was finished, we sent it to about 40 labels, heard back from a few, and Cory was the most excited. He’d just [partnered with] Misra and said there was room for us there.”

That Brown showed immediate interest in the band is the least surprising part of the story. Collective Psychosis Begone is a weird and wonderful debut, the spirit of which is captured in the group’s very name. In the 1963 Adolfas Mekas comedy, Hallelujah the Hills, two men in pursuit of the same woman take to the woods in order to purge themselves of her, and hilarity naturally ensues. “There’s some really beautiful imagery and some really nice moments, though,” explains Walsh, “and it’s fun and adventurous and doesn’t play by a lot of rules. When it came time for us to need a band name, we thought, ‘let’s do that.’”

The imagery and the “really nice moments” are woven throughout Collective Psychosis Begone, where we are invited to join a motley collection of characters: silent film star grandmothers, stillborn Chinese babies, and retiring scientists all march together in a triumphant sonic parade. Keeping them company along the way are the band’s six members, who have even written their own trumpet-fueled fight song to honor their entrance into the world. “If you’re human and you’re feeling displaced, we’ve got news for you,” they sing in weary harmony on “Slow Motion Records Broken at Breakneck Speeds.” The news is frightening—the world around us is essentially falling apart—but the story’s narrator is “content to sit here and watch it all happen with you.”

Not since Clem Snide’s The Ghost of Fashion have we as listeners been invited to get so cozy with discomfort. The band works hard on accompanying the confusion with their own brand of harmony: a melodica, a cello, and an organ intertwine with boisterous results on some tracks, while other songs benefit from the simplicity found in a solitary trumpet. Walsh’s wavering shout offers a bit of direction throughout it all, “We’ll sing a crooked path back to our homes!” he announces on “Wave Backwards to Massachusetts.”

It becomes quickly apparent that Walsh is as familiar with the idea of the strangeness of ordinary life in his songwriting as he is in his own life experiences; math, science and space all come into question throughout Collective Psychosis Begone. “I’m not in any way a sort of scientific person,” he admits. “I operate mostly on gut instinct, but I love to read about that stuff. I don’t have the kind of mind that can do what scientific people do. When I do read about how something works, I think I make up my own version. When I do feel like I understand something, it doesn’t take away from the wonder.”

The album’s closer, “To All My Scientist Colleagues I Bid You Farewell”, serves a fitting tribute to this notion. Against an acoustic backdrop (no adornment is necessary for a man of science), the narrator looks back upon a career spent dissecting life and putting it under a microscope. After one has inspected the inner workings of all things, what is there left to imagine? For such a man, the mundane feels truly foreign: “I’m planning to open a newspaper stand / with a shoe shine chair just for a laugh / While I’m selling the present / my mind will drift back to the past.” Taken out of context, the man of science seems as lonely and nostalgic as any of us.

As for his own career, Walsh is happy to continue down his current path for as long as it is willing to carry him. A great deal has been said about the bold (if offhand) statement that the band’s future will include the release of at least 33 albums. “People really latched on to that in the press release,” laughs Walsh, “and I’m not sure why. I guess it’s our core way of saying we’d love to continue.”

If future efforts hold up as well as Collective Psychosis Begone, we can only hope that, for once, a press release lives up to its promise. To a world where logic and wonder so often converge, Hallelujah the Hills provides a warm and welcome soundtrack.

Listen: “Hallelujah the Hills” [at HallelujahTheHills.com]

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