“Upward Mobility” is guided by both guitar and piano along the tracks of Madchester’s psychedelic dance-rock. And the chorus, “I’ve got my redemption and I’ve got my disease / but now I can’t be bothered with reality,” becomes a commentary on the conundrum of 21st century technology. “Stoic Resemblance” has a bouncy pop exterior and krautrock underpinnings, the catchiness in Summers’ vocal melodies forming the sunny end of a contrast that exaggerates Weikel’s regimented beat. Rather than getting buried in the studio, tinkering and obsessing over minutiae, Summers and Weikel pushed unconventional ideas to the forefront and let them come to rest there, coloring in the rest later.Įach of the 10 songs manages to incorporate something in the way of new sounds or structures for The Helio Sequence, exciting shifts that are subtly blended with the band’s well-honed strengths and established style. The duo came up with 26 finished songs last May, and from those demos picked the 10 they’d record. The Helio Sequence is the result of in-studio brainstorming, a self-imposed challenge to create as much new music as they could in one month. “Oh, I’m looking for a new direction / Oh, I’m looking for another way,” sings Summers on the opening “Battle Lines,” introducing the album’s in-the-moment spirit and conveying a sense of openness and yearning that remains throughout.

The core remains-endlessly intertwining guitars, drums and keyboards-but there’s a palpable thrill in how Summers and Weikel approach and recombine these elements. The Helio Sequence has always sounded bigger than a duo, but on the band’s sixth album, Brandon Summers (guitars/vocals) and Benjamin Weikel (keyboards/drums) leave nothing hiding in the shadows, stretching beyond their prior albums in bold new strokes. And that self-titled record becomes their best work yet. For The Helio Sequence, in deliberately confronting those boundaries, a new alchemy is born. Some bands remain there, some mistakenly take on too-drastic changes, others recapture their essence via expansion and experimentation. It doesn't show a large degree of variety, but it does intimate potentially vast possibilities, which makes it an arresting first effort.A veteran band releasing a self-titled album is one of the more direct statements of purpose in rock music: This new sound, this is our identity now.ĭespite an impressive run of albums, sometimes a signature style can come to define a band’s own boundaries. But it is also not really appropriate to call the Helio Sequence Beatlesesque, and Com Plex ultimately doesn't have the vast scope of an album like Revolver or My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. The entirety of Com Plex works off this template, but never in the obvious ways that many Beatles-loving pop bands tend to. They execute an incredible cover of the psychedelic touchstone, 'Tomorrow Never Knows,' that might be closer to the way John Lennon heard it in his head than even the Beatles ended up recording, maintaining the paranoid low-end and splayed Chemical Brothers-style percussion, but turning the tripped-out ambience of LSD-based spiritual searching into the much more untidy and bewildering jungle that it is in reality. Interestingly enough, the band that the Helio Sequence most recall insinuate in an odd way is mid-period Beatles. It is not exactly the wall of glorious caterwaul that My Bloody Valentine created, nor the austere moonscapes of Pink Floyd, although both bands are decided influences. 'Stacenska 612,' for instance, is a spooky web of futuristic ambience, and the vocals, doubled and whispered, tusseling and intertwined like vines, come across like the voices inside your head. The music is frequently surreal, as recognizable sounds warp into unshapely ones, and it reflects back at itself creating spectacular mechanistic feedback. With Summers playing guitar and singing and Weikel handling the drums as well as the sequenced keyboards and samplers, Com Plex lives up to its name, an ambitious and amorphous concoction. Following a self-released EP, Brandon Summers and Benjamin Weikel holed up in the one room music store from which both collect their regular paychecks and returned with this lovely, challenging full-length, engineered, produced, mixed, and mastered by the duo themselves. From the quiet confines of Portland suburb Beaverton, one doesn't expect an explosion of blistering ambience to emerge, but that is precisely what the debut album from the Helio Sequence creates.

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