published on August 13, 2024 in Celeb Gist

Liner Notes: The Helio Sequence

After 2004’s disappointingly clunky “Love and Distance” (Sub Pop), I didn’t expect to follow The Helio Sequence‘s future output all that closely. Yet the new “Keep Your Eyes Ahead” (Sub Pop) finds the duo pulling a complete 180, and regenerating my interest in the process.

Trading its former album’s dense keyboard compositions for a more expansive and organic sound, “Keep Your Eyes Ahead” is the work of a band commanding its audience’s attention. Stand out tracks like “Hallelujah” and “Can’t Say No” show the band flexing its melodic muscles, branching out into grandiose guitar rock territory without sacrificing the nuance and keyboard flourishes of its early work.

The Helio Sequence plays the Black Cat on May 20, and Express spoke with drummer-keyboardist Benjamin Weikel, to analyze “Keep Your Eyes Ahead” track by track. What did we learn? People in Portland start choirs for fun, closet space can alter the sonic direction of an album and touring as the drummer of Modest Mouse for a few years can teach you something about your own band.

(You can listen to many songs from “Keep Your Eyes Ahead” on The Helio Sequence’s MySpace page.)

“Lately” came at a turning point in the recording process. One day when Brandon was recording his guitar, he discovered we had these two closets in our recording space that were really odd. He became inspired and decided to put the microphones in the closets while the guitar amps were in the main room. The mix created this big crazy reverb sound, which wound up defining the sound of the record. Everything we recorded after that involved us sticking mics in the closets and recording.

It took a really long time to put [the CD’s running order] together. We had some extra songs that we didn’t know what to do with. I would wake up every day and try a different song order before I went out. I tried it over and over. There were times I though I had figured it out and then Brandon wouldn’t be into it or vice versa. It eventually felt like the album had a meaning with the first song being “Lately” and the last being “No Regrets” because you get the sense that this narrator, whoever this is singing, has a revelation by the end. And it’s just so cool that it happened that way because it was all luck because we’re [not] talented enough to do all of that ahead of time [laughs[]. Paying attention to those kinds of details scales back to the early days where a lot of our favorite records had a really powerful song order. It’s like the whole concept record idea where you don’t just make a record that’s a collection of songs but you try to have it make sense as a whole.

» “Can’t Say No” [Download MP3]
This was the first song we discovered for this record. Coming into recording, Brandon had about five or six songs and I had about eight, not including the hundreds of keyboard loops we had to sift through. “Can’t Say No” was the first thing that really stuck out for us, it was like the starting point of the record for us. There was something about this song that really felt good.

At this point, it’s kind of hard to be influenced by any new records you hear. A lot of times now, we’ll make choices to try and make a certain type of an album. On our last album, “Love and Distance,” we were trying to do this really weird Top 40 thing with an almost R & B influence which most people didn’t get at all [laughs]. For “Keep Your Eyes Ahead,” we tried do something a little lusher. Not stark necessarily, but something more organic sounding.

So, those were some of the ideas we talked about before writing any songs. But it’s funny because you talk about these things but you never know how it’s going to actually flesh out. So it’s strange that we had all of these conversations and it kind of ended up like it did. A lot of records it is really easy to hear what they are derivative from. With a lot of my friends in Portland, we all listen to so many different kinds of music that when it comes to making something each part of a song can have its own influence. Since it all stems from something completely different, when you put it all together it doesn’t necessarily sound like anything specifically.

» “The Captive Mind”
We almost didn’t use this song because we realized early on that one of the vocal melodies is very similar to a Modest Mouse song [“Gravity Rides Everything“]. For a while we couldn’t figure out what song it was and but we knew it was somewhere and just couldn’t place it. We asked our friends about and they said that it didn’t sound anything like that song and not to worry about it. As a band, we’re really conscious about trying not to put out anything that really sounds like anything else. It’s one of our ideals … one that I think hurts us sometimes [laughs].

» “You Can Come to Me”
Another song based off a keyboard sequence that Brandon kind of chopped up, which you can hear in the verse where all the keyboards cut out and it’s just the guitar, bass and vocals. The ending of that song, I wanted to do something kind of cool and sequenced something and it still wasn’t quite right. Brent [Knopf] from Menomena was hanging out with Brandon and asked his advice on what to do with one of the songs on [the 2007 CD] “Friend or Foe” so he decided to ask him about what to do with the end of this song and Brent just sat down on the piano and that was that.

» “Shed Your Love”
This was actually recorded before anything else, somewhere around 2005. When I first heard the raw track from Brandon we thought it was just too acoustic sounding and didn’t really fit with what we were doing. Eventually he tried all of these other things with it and then I added some keyboards to it.

I remember showing him the song in the studio. It was just one of those really powerful moments where I had felt like I was almost tearing up because it was so great. It’s different. It’s a little scary doing songs that are that open emotionally. One of the challenges of doing a song like that is if you’re open to it, it can be a really powerful but if you’re not, it can kind of be a turnoff. Sometimes you have to just take that gamble and hope for the best.

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I play brushes on that song live. It’s challenging doing stuff like that live especially depending on the show because it can be the point where you lose the crowd. But it’s become really fun for us to try and be more dynamic in our performances. That’s one revelation I had from playing with Modest Mouse. I realized how many different places you can go to within a set in terms of going from quiet to loud, slow and fast and that it’s OK to push as long as you have an audience that wants to hear your songs.

» “Keep Your Eyes Ahead” [Download MP3]
Lyrically, this song ended up being the middle ground between “Lately” and “No Regrets.” It’s funny because this was a tune that Brandon had played to me very quickly in passing but I had actually never heard it. On the demo, he played the drums and recorded the bass with a baritone guitar. And so when I found it on the hard drive and listened to it, I was just like, “Why are we not working on this one? This song’s great!”

The lyrics started off really different but when the record started making sense as a whole the rest of the lyrics came pretty quickly. I think a lot of the things that Brandon did with this song came very spontaneously. Personally, I really feel like he stepped up lyrically on this record.

[The] video is all about Whitey McConnaughy, who directed it. He’s done a video for The Thermals and Band of Horses. He also did a Top 20, TRL video for Cobra Starship. He put so much time and energy into the video and it came out pretty amazingly considering our budget.

He had shown us all of these pictures and kept on talking about a stage and all of these lights filmed at locations with no one around. It sounded so impossible but it all came together. It was all shot without a permit which is obviously not something that you could do in a bigger city, late at night. Some of the locations we could start filming around 10 p.m. but most places we couldn’t start until about 2 or 3 a.m. Some of the nights it was raining, some of the nights it was just freezing. It was really miserable at times [laughs]. But he had such a strong idea about what he wanted so we trusted him especially after seeing a few shots after the first day. From then on, we agreed to whatever he wanted.

» “Back to This”
This one was recorded simply and very quickly. One mic on the drums and was done in just one guitar take. A lot of keyboard; definitely reminded us of the “Young Effectuals” era of The Helio Sequence. This one was just really fun and easy. At first we weren’t too sure whether we’d keep it because it started off really scrappy and got cut up.

» “Hallelujah”
This song took a really long time to work out. It was written off a keyboard sequence I made. It went through so many different evolutionary points that for a while it looked like we weren’t going to be able to use it. We had originally wanted to have the chorus come back toward the end of the song but I loved the ending we ended up with. At that point in the record, it felt OK for a song not to be formulaic and it kind of reminded us of those weird musical moments we used to have, especially on “Young Effectuals.” It was definitely fun to do something like that because I really miss having stuff like that … maybe there’ll be more of that in the future.

» “Broken Afternoon”
[It sounds like early Bob Dylan] and in that way that song does sort of stick out on the record. Some people might say it’s their favorite or their least favorite; it’s definitely the one where you can hear the influence really clearly. It’s tough though because I don’t think that Brandon ever thought that song was ever going to go on the record. And I probably didn’t either. It just ended up fitting in with some of the other things we were doing and in the end it made the cut.

» “No Regrets”
I found this on Brandon’s hard drive while he was away looking to see if there was anything on there that I hadn’t heard. It turns out that quite a few songs that ended up on the record came from this process.

It is just this funny, odd little song that I immediately really loved and wanted to use. When we first started it, it didn’t have a full choir; then Brandon went and recorded about 30 tracks of him in all different parts of the room to create this lo-fi effect. At the time, we were doing this choir thing with Menomena when they came out with “Friend and Foe.” Going to those practices gave us the idea to put that sound into a song. We started off thinking we’d recruit people to sing in the choir but it turned out just to be Brandon [laughs].

» Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW; with Pattern Is Movement , Tue., 9 p.m., $10; 202-397-7328. (U St.-Cardozo)

Written by Express contributor Matthew Siblo

Photos by Pavlina Honcova-Summers

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