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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.

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.

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?

They are a band full of contradictions. With guitar, strings, keyboards and brass all at the band’s disposal, they’ve created some wonderful arrangements that are crowded yet manage to retain a surprising amount of clarity... There’s just so much potential on display here that it is hard not to be excited about Hallelujah The Hills.

There’s perfect pop melodies hidden in the rock frames of numbers like “Wave Backwards to Massachusetts”, but there’s some strange drifts of folksy surrealism throughout the album as well.