Hello Death’s timeless, graceful gloom

We exist in what feels like a particularly bleak moment in human history.

I hesitate to make this sort of statement, because people are always romanticizing the past. The truth is that things have always been bad. Even on the brightest days, tragedy is just around the corner.

Though the darkness is ever present, it mustn’t be all consuming. This is what the hauntingly beautiful music of Hello Death reminds us.

Hello Death combines elements of folk, rock, choral and baroque. In spirit, it is not that dissimilar to heavy metal. Menace lies just beneath Hello Death's elegant, ornate surface.

It is a testament to the Milwaukee band’s songwriting that its new record, For Those With Many Hearts, was recorded several years ago, yet poignantly portrays the severity of this moment.

To say that Hello Death emerged out of the now defunct Group of the Altos — which featured 16 members at its peak — would be acutely accurate.

Not only were Hello Death’s four members in Altos, but the first song on the first Hello Death album was originally conceived as a song within an Altos song.

“The plan was that Altos was going to play a song and Marielle [Allschwang] and I would start playing another song that she wrote underneath it,” recalls Nathaniel Heuer.

“Then we would bring up the volume so they would be playing simultaneously and then that song would drop back out, almost like somebody turned up the radio in the background.”

Altos tried to flesh the idea out, but never performed it live. Instead, Allschwang and Heuer, along with Erin Wolf and Shawn Stephany, turned it into “Settlers”, the opening howl on Hello Death’s 2013 self-titled debut. Even the quartet’s name comes from Altos, who were once called “Hello Death, Goodbye Killers.”

That being said, Hello Death is far more than an Altos side project. It is the brainchild of bassist and vocalist Nathaniel Heuer, who had been working on some of the base material before he moved to Milwaukee and joined Altos.

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Roots

Nathaniel Heuer is a native of Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was in the Twin Cities that Heuer developed an affinity for heavy metal and jazz. It is also where Heuer had his initial meeting with death. When Heuer was fourteen, the drummer in his first band perished in a house fire.

“I feel like I had a moment of clarity when that happened. I realized that nobody is special in regards to that,” says Heuer.

Heuer continued to play music through high school, but quit after graduation. He dropped out of college twice, eventually becoming a bartender in Chicago. After a few years, Heuer grew tired of the nightlife and traveled to rural New Jersey to learn carpentry. Upon his return to Chicago, Heuer began playing music again.

Shawn Stephany first met Heuer at the Empty Bottle in Chicago. A native of Dubuque, Iowa, Stephany moved to Milwaukee to attend art school. Stephany was one of the original members of Group of the Altos.

In 2009, Heuer approached Stephany, Allschwang and Wolf about collaborating on a project outside of Altos. Heuer had specific instrumentation in mind, which included piano and string arrangements.

“I was really excited about it,” recalls Stephany, who plays guitar and lap steel. “I had heard some of the stuff he’d been working on and I liked the mood of it.”

The quartet began playing in Heuer’s living room and spent a year learning to play together.

“I liked Nathaniel’s writing style, it was a little quirky,” says Wolf, who grew up in the Milwaukee area and sang in choir through college. Wolf sings and plays piano and keyboard in Hello Death.

In addition to playing with Hello Death, Milwaukee native Marielle Allschwang fronts her own band and is the most recent member to join Collections of Colonies of Bees. In Hello Death, Allschwang plays violin, guitar and sings.

“Playing with Hello Death is really cool because it’s a chance to feel music in a different way and it allows me to spend more time being an instrumentalist,” says Allschwang.

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Leaves

The first time I saw Hello Death live was the band’s one and only show without Wolf, who had fallen ill. I was impressed and intrigued, but when I saw them all together I realized how much was missing in Wolf’s absence.

The interplay between Heuer’s deep baritone, Allschwang's airy alto and Wolf’s mezzo soprano is riveting. It’s like the grim reaper speaking to a pair of angels, though the female vocals have their own sinister edge.

“I usually write the chord changes and the melody, but I don’t write too much,” says Heuer of the band's songwriting process.

“I might only write diatonic chord voicings, so I’m just playing the root and whatever I want to stress, then I let the band fill it in. You get way more interesting things happening that way,” adds Heuer.

“There’s a lot of experimentation that occurs when we’re writing songs,” says Stephany. “I still make variations every time we practice, which I may or may not use again.”

Hello Death’s 2013 debut was recorded at April Base Studios in Fall Creek, Wisconsin, the home studio of Bon Iver. In 2015, Hello Death released Remnants, a collection of songs recorded during the same sessions.

One month before releasing Remnants, Hello Death recorded the songs that would become For Those With Many Hearts at a friend's barn in Cedarburg called Speckled Chemistry. Engineer Jamie Hansen worked with the band on both recordings.

“Jamie was the common thread,” says Stephany. “April Base was an immersive kind of thing. You’re sleeping there, you’re eating there, you’re doing everything there, so recording can happen all the time.

“The barn was just as fun,” adds Stephany. “Depending on how late things went, we stayed there, but for some of it we were going back home.”

“We’ve been to Halloween parties there, we shot our video there, so all of us were just super comfortable,” says Wolf of recording at Speckled Chemistry. “It was far enough away that we could concentrate and not get distracted by personal stuff.”

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Suspension

Hello Death originally intended to release For Those With Many Hearts in October 2015, in conjunction with the Alverno Presents “Prince Uncovered” show, which they curated. But the record was put on the shelf and there it sat for a handful of years.

Meanwhile, Heuer and a business partner began searching for a space where they could build a recording studio. In the process, they stumbled into additional warehouse space that they’ve turned into artist studios in Milwaukee’s Harbor District.

The construction of The Chair Company recording space and the artist studios further delayed the release of For Those With Many Hearts. Since opening its doors in 2017, The Chair Company has become Hello Death and Marielle Allschwang’s rehearsal space.

“Nathaniel and Lawton have built a really beautiful, well organized space with anything that I could imagine needing for something that I’d want to do. It’s become a home base of sorts,” says Allschwang.

Recently, Allschwang released a two-song EP that was recorded at The Chair Company.

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Toil

While For Those With Many Hearts has endured an usually long gestation period, fans of Hello Death’s gorgeously grisly sound will find it worth the wait.

“When I listen to the album now I hear the original demos that Nathaniel sent,” says Allschwang. “I remember those songs being such a uniquely cohesive set.”

The first thing you hear is a tape click then heavy bass strokes, as if Heuer is wielding a sword. In the middle of the first song — "Talk" — a steady drum beat kicks in. Throughout the record, percussion acts as a cooling mechanism to the otherwise molten layers of sound.

The lyrics on the new record grapple with familiar subjects — dread, death and doom. The album’s first single — “Tin House” — was released the day President Trump took office. It stands as one of the great protest songs of the Trump Era.

Yet For Those With Many Hearts is not all anguish and despair. The narrator in these songs seems to have found a sense of peace, an anchor amid the misery. For Heuer, that anchor is his wife and two young daughters.

“I do maintain a hopefulness,” says Heuer. “Seeing my daughters and how they deal with things, like their thoughts and fears. I try to stay acutely aware of the fragility of life and having children is the most insane reminder of that.”

Despite the eternal qualities of For Those With Many Hearts, it is a record rooted in a time and place. This is most apparent on “The Willow Trees,” a minute-long hymn sung amid a torrential downpour. This song, and the record as a whole, urges us to embrace the moment and to make something of it, whether the sun is shining or the sky is falling.

Hello Death will play a record release show on Saturday, June 23, at Anodyne Coffee Roasting Co. in Walker's Point, with support from Liv Mueller and Mark Waldoch. Tickets are $10, with free admission to those 17 and under.