| I really dug the hypnotic way this disc began, even though I couldn’t quite place who or what they sounded like (with that oddly featured mouth harp, beat box and rock-steady drum mix goin’ on et all). The emergence of the first lead vocal pulled me away from my reverie though, as it just seemed too “groovy” or something for the rest of the music. This proved to be a major problem for these ears throughout “Love and Distance”, the new offering on Sub-Pop by The Helio Sequence. It’s a shame, as the band definitely has a way with interesting choruses despite their tendency towards trite verses, as many of them tended to pull me right back into the song at the precise point when I had almost completely lost focus. Nowhere is this trend better exemplified then on the second track of the cd, “Repeater”. The song begins, like so many on the disc, with a very cool instrumental groove, but one that only gets left behind by lyrics that are not up to the task. In this case, singer Brandon Summers croons “I’m on a roll and there’s nowhere to go, where we going now, out of control”… come to think of it, I couldn’t have said it better myself. The tune redeems itself, however, with a pretty amazing chorus, one that conjures up the likes of Franz Ferdinand and the Beatles. At other points on the disc, The Helio Sequence are at their best when they reminded me, however fleeting, of those bands, or XTC, Let’s Active, Stereolab and Mercury Rev for that matter. The band seems to be at their worst when the bombast of bad U2 sets in, a Prefab Sprout drippiness saturates the mood, or they force Sparklehorse without the sparkle. The lone songs where the exact opposite verse/chorus phenomenon (that I mentioned earlier) occurs are “Let it Fall Apart” and “Everyone Knows Everyone”, titles that seem to almost dare the listener to try and pidgeon-hole this band. The low point on the cd has got to be “Blood Bleeds”, a song that almost kept me from listening to the remaining three songs on the disc. I’m glad I didn’t give in to this impulse, however, as the following track, “S.O.S”, I found to be one of the most enjoyable songs on the entire album. This push and pull does make “Love and Distance” interesting to listen to, and demands that it get more than one turn in the cd carrier, but I’m still not quite sure who this band is and what this all leads to… |