9/9 9/10: Blind Pilot will be doing back to back shows on Thursday September 9th and Friday September 10th. But whatever's gotten into the Helio Sequence over the last few years, their persistence is continuing to pay off. What the Helio Sequence got was less a reboot than a new lease on life. Nowadays, it's not such a rare thing for a band to get something of a second act, but it's the rare band that seems to know what to do with it. Much the same could be said of the Helio Sequence itself, a band that's really only come into its own over these last two records. Negotiations takes a little time to get your head around, its charms more subtle- and more rewarding- than they seem on first pass. Sure, you'll find something to latch onto in every song, but you won't always walk away from Negotiations with its choruses in your head it's a more consistent record than its predecessor, but more orderly, too, and the highs just aren't quite as high. Rather than shooting for the stratosphere like, say, Keep Your Eyes Ahead's infectious title track, the songs on Negotiations tend to take a more circuitous path, allowing for both more space and more sinew in the arrangements. Negotiations' relative lack of beat-you-over-the-head bluster is commendable, but if there's any knock against the record, it's its reticence to go all out, even just the once. There's a lot of half-lovelorn, half-triumphant stuff about shadows falling and open letters and the like, which can feel like awfully broad strokes the music, too, with its spacious chords, aqueous synths, and deliberate pacing, sometimes suggests more than it's willing to offer outright. The "insurance claims, the one night stands, and sad refrains" Summers sings of on Negotiations seem to speak to a very adult sort of drama, but he's not always big on particulars, which makes most of Negotiations' lyrics the kind you've got to put yourself into to get much out of. Makes sense, really: you've gotta step back a little ways just to take it all in. Negotiations' first line- "Hey now, draw yourself more near to me"- quickly brings you in close, but much of the rest of the record operates at a slight distance. Summers' new voice isn't that of a young man, and he brings some of that maturity to Negotiations' smoldering affairs of the heart. His pie-eyed delivery conjures everybody from the Walkmen's Ham Leithauser minus a couple of fingers of scotch to the Killers' frontman Brandon Flowers scrubbed of a few layers of schmaltz, but his slightly jazzy, behind-the-beat delivery and refusal to bug his eyes out in search of the big note leaves things sounding rich, inviting, and with just the right amount of emotional heft. Sidestepping go-for-broke bombast and easy melodrama, Summers and Weikel lean into Negotiations' curves, making their every move count.īehind the mic, Summers knows both when to go for broke and when to pull it back. Hints of psych and prog color the margins here, but by and large, Negotiatons takes the romantic sweep of 1980s arena-pop and plays it with the relative emotional reserve and compositional trickiness of turn-of-the-millenium Pacific Northwest indie. They're as good with the more muted mid-tempo stuff as they are with blood-pumping uplift Summers' wine-drunk Dylan routine, passable at best, made up most of Keep Your Eyes Ahead's weaker moments, but the dusky "Harvester of Souls" and the twinkling makeout synths of "Silence on Silence" prove they're as deft with a ballad as they are with anything bigger. With its elliptical song-structures and pristine production, Negotiations neatly sidesteps much of the excess (both sonic and emotional) associated with pop on this scale it's rare that Summers and multi-instrumentalist Ben Weikel sound like a duo, exactly, but time and again they know just when to quit piling it on. But it's a graceful, reserved sort of grandiosity: Negotiations' melodies are shapely, its tone autumnal, its playing confident and unshowy. Negotiations, like Keep Your Eyes Ahead before it, is just a big record, its towering choruses and wide-open spaces making for plenty of high drama.
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