Indie rock reviews that could be summed up with the words "good music, bad singer" number in the hundreds. That the Helio Sequence-- to date, a good-not-great duo on Sub Pop and Cavity Search-- buck this trend stands as one of the pleasant surprises of the still-young year. Brandon Summers is a compelling, economical, and technically sound vocalist and his strides as a frontman carry the band's fourth album, Keep Your Eyes Ahead, an uneven but varied affair that suggests a long and fulfilling trajectory for the Helio Sequence.
Summers' development comes with a tidy backstory: Amidst touring for 2004 Sub Pop debut Love and Distance, Summers lost his voice, read Dylan's Chronicles, and saw a doctor who instructed him not to sing for almost two months. The resultant scare led Summers to a feast of indie rock anomalies: healthy living via exercise and a regular practice/recording schedule and technical improvement via singing exercises. The results lie in ascendant vocals that replace awkward growls and breathy whispers with precise notes and even phrasing.
Summers and keyboardist/drummer Benjamin Weikel thankfully did not let this increased attention to detail and professionalism derail their ember-glow indie pop. Keep Your Eyes Ahead is an ambitiously large album, gassing Summer's voice with reverb and bottle-rocketing all sorts of synths and effected guitars into lilting rock songs performed with the measure and craft of Northwest scene veterans. The push-push verses of "Can't Say No" and the tremble-y guitars of "Lately" encompass the flat skies and multitudinous bridges of hometown Portland; "The Captive Mind" eagerly recalls Modest Mouse's "Gravity Rides Everything". The pulsing sequencer of "Hallelujah", the album's longest and most strident anthem, plays counterpoint to Summer's long, loose solos. The muscular title track wrestles lustily with the Stone Roses: "You came on like you knew you would/ Wearing high-top shoes walking home from school/ And I just 'bout fell right off the balcony."
The unfortunate side effect of Summer's newfound expertise is that, well, he's apt to use it. Singers like "carrying" songs, and Keep Your Eyes Ahead falters when Summers and Weikel set aside their wiring and aim for folk sounds subtly aided by ambient backgrounds, a swell idea if your slow tracks don't sound like the ballads from Dylan's Down in the Groove. Lines like "Drank the dark wine of the New York night/ With shattered mind across the borderline" do not help. On Keep Your Eyes Ahead's final track, the harmonica-led "No Regrets", the two get it right: clacking percussion behind a drunken sing-a-long that suggests that, yeah, the Helio Sequence might one day pull off this Americana tip, too. Even when it fails, Keep Your Eyes Ahead has a refreshing maturity and presence, old enough to admit that folk jamboree and synth-rock can coexist, hopeful enough to think Joshua Tree, or at least Ocean Rain, was a really good idea. Summers got religion right during "Hallelujah"-- "We don't want answers, anyway"-- but the wisdom is equally appropriate for his and Weikel's newfound skills. Keep Your Eyes Ahead is content to see where merely questioning gets you.
