Love and Distance

The Helio Sequence's first two albums were dense, exciting blasts of noise, melody, and electronic wildness that seemed to jump out of the speakers. Their third album, Love and Distance, is still fairly loud, dreamy rock, but the wall of sound has been pared back and the vocals have been brought to the forefront. Instead of dreamily floating along with the waves of noise, now Brandon Summers grittily shouts over the top. The guitars no longer howl and crash about; they are layered carefully and applied cautiously. Instead of sounding like the teenage spawn of My Bloody Valentine and Mouse on Mars, now they sound like a cousin to Radiohead. The closing "Looks Good (But You Looked Away)" is the kind of cosmic country that Beachwood Sparks do so well, with a very nice laid-back, outer space feel. Maybe to a fresh set of ears, Love and Distance might sound like an interesting take on the whole modern Radiohead-y guitar rock with electronics thing, and this is certainly better than South or Elbow. Chalk it up as a holding pattern on the way to something else, and maybe even a "grower."