String Machine Level up with Open-Hearted Grandeur on the Triumphant Hallelujah Hell Yeah
The third album from Pittsburgh's String Machine is a set of life-affirming songs, as ambitious as it is inviting
Hallelujah Hell Yeah, the title of the third album from Pittsburgh’s String Machine, is the perfect motivational affirmation for the times in which we’re living. All of our actions are compromised, in some respects. So it’s just easier to live our lives embracing that we all left the assembly line a little dinged up and oblong. Like using the right amount of force to guide a shopping cart with a wobbly wheel, the best we can hope for is getting to a place of equilibrium. On this new collection of tunes, lead String Machine songwriter and de facto leader David Beck illustrates our inescapable reality as he trades in his obsessions with the damaged soundscapes and obtuse narratives of homespun, lo-fi masterminds like Neutral Milk Hotel and The Microphones for a set of life-affirming songs with the grandeur of Arcade Fire and the tunefulness of The New Pornographers.
While String Machine’s 2019 album Death of the Neon had shown Beck’s strengths as a songwriter and arranger, the concept of the group as a “collective” showed through in their music, sounding more like a collection of individual performances than a group of musicians playing together. Where instruments would once pile on to fit the sprawl, now arrangements swell and assimilate into the album’s hook-filled movements. At times, the effectiveness of the band’s compact presentation evokes a more analog and earthbound Electric Light Orchestra running through the songbook of Conor Oberst.
In a recent conversation I had with Beck for a forthcoming episode of the Ears to Feed In Conversation podcast, Beck recalled listening to Motion City Soundtrack and Tom Petty’s Wildflowers while writing some of the material on Hallelujah Hell Yeah. He explained that listening to and thinking about how those artists would convey their emotions in ways that would not only please the members of their bands, but would also be enjoyable to see as an audience member attributed to the streamlined focus this time around. As the tried-and-true scripture from Saint Thomas Petty reads, “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.”