My first encounter with The Helio Sequence happened in February 2008 when they helped me get through a break-up. The kind where you and your “significant other” have that awkward final meeting, where you exchange the things you’ve borrowed from each other over the course of your feeble relationship. And like most young lovers after a break-up, I felt like I was living in a fog. For weeks I neglected the encouragement of my family and friends, uncompromisingly believing that my romantic career was dead and buried at the melodramatic age of 18. Then I discovered The Helio Sequence while surfing The Cure station on Pandora. I think it was one of those Six Degrees of Separation deals that took me from England’s pouty Goth-rockers to Death Cab for Cutie to Modest Mouse (after some rigorous “thumbs upping and downing”) and eventually to The Helio Sequence.
The song was “Lately,” off of their fourth album, 2008’s Keep Your Eyes Ahead. The triumphantly bellowed chorus line of “I’m living alone / I don’t need you anymore” tapped right into my soul. It was kind of spooky. The Helio Sequence was something fresh on the playlist, something unfamiliar and uplifting. So I decided to open the shades of my room, bathe, put away my Robert Smith-brand mascara and look further into the Oregonian outfit.
At the time, Keep Your Eyes Ahead was their latest effort to date, with three studio albums preceding. I gave a few more listens into the album’s other tracks. Songs like “You Can Come to Me” and the title track “Keep Your Eyes Ahead” put me on the upswing with their catchy melodies, rolling drumming and brilliant vocal harmonies. I was shocked when I Google’d them and found out that they were a duo. They sounded too large for only having two members, and so my curiosity was further investigated. After doing a full-Internet search, I discovered that the group’s drummer, Benjamin Weikel, actually played with Modest Mouse (take that Kevin Bacon!) on the group’s 2004 commercial breakthrough album Good News for People Who Love Bad News.
Now onto their fifth album Negotiations, slated for a September 11 release, The Helio Sequence have released the single “October,” a track done in the same mellowed-out harmonic tradition as their previous effort. Though I am only given this brief 4:41 glimpse of the record to come, I can be sure that The Helio Sequence won’t fail to spark my curiosity twice.