Ryan Walsh makes collages.
Not with craft scissors, construction paper and magazine cutouts but with music. He takes a guitar, a trumpet, a cello, a keyboard, a bass, a sampler, and glues it all together with his soothing, trembling voice.
It all started with a vision born while Walsh sat in a cinema class at Boston University, watching the 1963 film Hallelujah the Hills, directed by Lithuanian filmmaker Adolfas Mekas. The film pays homage to cinematic genres with a patchwork of film noir, avant-garde, and slapstick comedy. From this quirky, slightly absurd film, Walsh decided, he would inherit his new indie-rock band’s moniker.
Tonight, Walsh and the rest of Hallelujah the Hills will adhere chunks of wry humor to chorus hooks while overlapping mixed instrumentation to create the group’s signature sound pastiche. The show will start at 10 p.m. at the Mill, 120 E. Burlington St. Admission is $6.
When not composing, lead singer Walsh is also a collage artist in a more literal sense: He designs the band’s album covers. front of Hallelujah the Hills’ latest album, Colonial Drones, mixes unusual image scraps — a roaring lion’s head on a man’s body, an aerial view of a drab neighborhood landscape, a lighthouse beacon, and a stack of literary classics.
“Ryan loves words,” Hallelujah the Hills’ cellist David Bentley said. “Ever since the beginning of college, he knew this was his vision. And he finally got his way.”
Bentley said the ensemble’s diverse instrumentation blends with purpose.
“Sometimes, bands will have a violin or a cello or a nontraditional instrument,” Bentley said. “And they have it just for the sake of having it.”
However, he reserves his cello’s potent sound for songs with distinct melodies — such as “Echoes of Sequence,” featured on Colonial Drones.
Bentley described the band’s live show as “a wall of sound” with “a lot going on onstage.” But lead singer Walsh said having a six-piece band simply means “more sounds.”
“Plus, if there’s any trouble in the crowd, there are six of us, so we could probably fight our way out,” Walsh said. “A couple instruments could be used as weapons.”