What the Helio Sequence once were isn't what they want to be anymore. On tour for 2004's so-so Love and Distance, the Portland widescreeners' Brandon Summers lost his voice, a rather unfortunate affliction for the vocalist of an indie rock band trying to make a go of it. Rather than pack it in, Summers went out, got healthy, and found himself a vocal coach to put him through the paces. It worked: 2008's Keep Your Eyes Ahead found Summers doing the best singing of his life, trading up from the oft-strained delivery of his earlier work for a newfound confidence and clarity. And the music followed, trading up from their middle-of-the-pack post-Beta Band synth-pop tinkering to something several shades bolder and more rousing. "The long and fulfilling trajectory" our Andrew Gaerig predicted would follow Keep Your Eyes Ahead continues apace with Negotiations, their fifth LP. As Summers continues to settle into his new voice, the music that surrounds it has grown ever-grander to match.
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. But it's a graceful, reserved sort of grandiosity: Negotiations' melodies are shapely, its tone autumnal, its playing confident and unshowy. 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. 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. 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. Sidestepping go-for-broke bombast and easy melodrama, Summers and Weikel lean into Negotiations' curves, making their every move count.
Behind the mic, Summers knows both when to go for broke and when to pull it back. 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. Summers' new voice isn't that of a young man, and he brings some of that maturity to Negotiations' smoldering affairs of the heart. 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. Makes sense, really: you've gotta step back a little ways just to take it all in. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. Negotiations takes a little time to get your head around, its charms more subtle-- and more rewarding-- than they seem on first pass. 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. 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. What the Helio Sequence got was less a reboot than a new lease on life. But whatever's gotten into the Helio Sequence over the last few years, their persistence is continuing to pay off.
