The Helio Sequence Are Back With A Bang.
A different sound and a different voice after four years of unreleased material.
The Helio Sequence
Keep Your Eyes Ahead
Released on Nov 30, -0001
Someone locked The Helio Sequence in a dirt cellar with some acoustic guitars, a stack of good books and a bottle of moonshine to record their latest album, Keep Your Eyes Ahead, or so it seems. From a band that had many a bleep and boop on their electronic tinged 2004 release Love and Distance, the band has stripped down the extra noise and gone back to the roots of music to give us an album that is both classically simple yet still refreshingly new.
Now, I'm pretty sure the band spent a lot of time crafting the pure and simple folk gems, but the album also has some standout heavy drum relying pop songs too, reminiscent of British folk rockers like Travis and Coldplay. Yeah, I went there, I said Coldplay, because I can genuinely hear Chris Martin's voice being interchangeable on a lot of the tracks like "Keep Your Eyes Ahead" and "The Captive Mind." Yet unlike the same song Coldplay continually repeats, The Helio Sequence somehow make each song stand on its own, while still blending with the rest of the album to create a common thread. So maybe the band also spent a few weeks traveling the British countryside living in pubs and eating meat pies too, but these are just scenarios I like to put rock musicians in. It gives me a geographical place to go to in my head, plus it gives me a sense of adventure, like I'm with the band as they travel and feel inspired by the landscape of their current situation to write a song. This is all probably a load of crap though, and they probably just threw back a few and wrote a damn song, but sometimes its fun to pretend, right?
The album really shines when the band counts on that classically simple folk song I mentioned earlier, like the stunning standout "Shed Your Love." The song is minimal and hushed, delivered in a whisper at times, and conveys an earnest and pure type of songwriting. It doesn't hide behind fancy instrumentation or production gimmicks, it's just a really great song that stands on its own, something that can be rare these days. The folk tunes keep rolling out on the track "Broken Afternoon," where lead singer Brandon Summers sounds like a less nasally Bob Dylan or a less rough Bruce Springsteen (post September 11th The Rising retrospective Springsteen that is). Of course the sound changed on Keep Your Eyes Ahead because of somewhat recent damage to Summers vocal chords, making his voice a lot more rough around the edges and deeper than the bands previous work. But where vocal chord damage usually can lead to the end of a singer's career, it actually helped Summers's voice gain even more character and depth. The album ends with the blues/folk track "No Regrets," a track that seems a bit tacked on at the end of the album, like someone thought it would be cool to end on a little blues jam. Although I want to mock their strategic effort, I have to applaud it, because the track works. It's a different feel than the start of the album, but since the album progresses from slick folk tinged pop songs to your more traditional folk rock offerings, "No Regrets" works perfectly as a closer that hopefully leaves the door open for more direct folk and blues infused tracks from The Helio Sequence in the future.
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Posted by Lisa White on Jan 31, 2008 @ 12:00 am