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Boston Globe

Ryan Walsh on the ambitious new 54-track Hallelujah the Hills album

Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Inspired by albums including the Magnetic Fields' 1999 opus '69 Love Songs,' Walsh and his bandmates built 'DECK' around a structure ubiquitous in our culture: playing cards, divided into clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. Advertisement 'Literally everyone has at least one deck in a junk drawer somewhere in the house,' says Walsh, who did the artwork for a Hallelujah the Hills bespoke deck to accompany the quadruple album. The deck of cards, which comes with a code to download the album, is available at Advertisement Once he presented the idea to the band and set up a crowd-funding arrangement on Patreon, Walsh assigned himself the task of writing a new song every week to bring to Hallelujah the Hills' Monday rehearsals (they recorded 54 of the 65 songs he brought in). After digging into his own psyche on 'I'm You,' he was also determined this time to avoid autobiography. 'Is there anything more self-indulgent than 54 special songs about all the troubles you've been through?,' Walsh asks, laughing. 'There's maybe one or two that drifts in there, but I was really trying to write fiction, you know, characters and scenarios that the listener could pour themselves into.' Walsh wrote without considering which suit the songs would belong to. Once the band arranged his sketches, the proper category seemed to suggest itself. 'Hearts' is for the sparser, more emotional songs. 'Clubs' comprises up-tempo rockers, while songs on 'Diamonds' lent themselves to big studio treatments, with horns and strings. 'Spades' became a repository for the weirder material. The result is a range of sounds evoking different moods: there's the yearning piano ballad 'Something Great (Jack of Hearts),' a fist-pumping sing-along feel on the rootsy rocker 'Burn This Atlas Down (2 of Clubs)', taut energy tangled up in a swirl of strings and guitars on the cathartic 'Rebuilding Year (4 of Diamonds)' and a catalog of crackpot conspiracy theories delivered with worrisome self-assurance over a repeating piano figure on 'No One Remembers Their Names (10 of Spades)'. Advertisement 'I wrote that song on Fourth of July,' Walsh says. 'I was thinking about US history and QAnon was still in the ether. And I was like, well, that's already crazier than I ever thought would be in the public dialogue. Let me try to go further.' For the first time, Hallelujah the Hills handed the microphone to other singers for some songs on 'DECK.' Many of the guest musicians have ties to Boston, which lends a sense of community to the project. 'No One Remembers Their Names' features lead vocals from Evan Sicuranza, who mixed many of the tracks on 'DECK' and played with Walsh in a previous band, the Stairs. The project also includes Clint Conley from Mission of Burma, 'Instantly I wished I had thought of it,' says Furman, a 2008 Tufts graduate who last month released her new album, 'Goodbye Small Head.' 'I just love a giant idea organized to a system like that. It sounded like the crazy kind of thing I would think of and be like, 'But that's impossible.'' Dupuis has known Walsh long enough to have heard him mention the idea for 'DECK' before the band started working on it. As someone 'with great respect for Ryan,' Dupuis was happy to join him on 'Crush All Night (5 of Clubs)', a song with grainy guitars and a thrumming rhythm that he has described as 'dirtbag rock,' to her delight. Advertisement 'A lot of times bands will give me the album's quiet songs to do a pretty duet on,' Dupuis said by email. 'I'm like, 'Let me rock, cowards. Let me yell.' Was thrilled the Hills let me rock — and they let me DIRTBAG rock, at that.' Though Hallelujah the Hills spent 2½ years working on 'DECK,' the band is determined not to be precious about the project, or how listeners engage with it. With so many different songs, there are plenty of ways to combine them: 635 billion, according to an insert in the band's deck of cards, which suggests compiling favorites into a playlist, or drawing 13 cards at random and building an 'audio tarot reading specifically for you.' 'Do whatever you want: Chop it up, like one song, like them all, listen to it in order,' Walsh says. 'It's kind of like materials for people to play with.' HALLELUJAH THE HILLS With Ugly Moon and Choo Choo La Rouge. Friday, June 20, 8 p.m. Myrtle, 134 Waterman Ave., East Providence. Free. With Bongwish and Choo Choo La Rouge. Saturday, June 21, 8 p.m., Deep Cuts, 21 Main St., Medford. $18 in advance, $20 at the door.