“ Bubbles” summons up the ghost of John Lennon wandering through a warehouse full of music boxes, Atari video games and upright vacuum cleaners. The opening “” is a keyboard and guitar overture not far removed the ambient work of Moby or Aphex Twin which then fades into “Give, Give, Give,” which is a pure distillation of the Helio Sequence - layer upon layer of sound supports a gentle melodic verse building to a chorus that sounds like two completely different songs fit together like an intricate puzzle box. Young Effectuals is less immediate than Com Plex, lacking great, catchy moments like “Just Mary Jane” and “Transistor Radio,” but it’s just as strong. While shoegazing is definitely part of the band’s DNA, their sound has many other aspects. (For the record, though, it still pales next to the original.)īy the time of their second album, Summers and Weikel were pegged as part of a shoegazer revival along with bands such as Charlene and Ester Drang. The rest of the album varies these two templates, including the only cover version of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” worth the time it took to record. The anthemic “Transistor Radio” would be a Top 40 hit if there were enough radio stations prepared to play a song that sounds like the Church filtered through My Bloody Valentine. “Just Mary Jane (Calypso)” follows with an equally bent but sunnier pop vibe. Halfway through the song it all clicks into a lockstep groove that goes on longer than it has any business to but still nowhere long enough - the effect is head-spinning and hypnotic.

While the pair have common ground with contemporary space rockers like Flying Saucer Attack and Windy & Carl, the Helio Sequence almost always anchor their flights into the cosmos on accessible - nearly bubblegum - pop music.Ĭom Plex gets off to a strong start with the pulsing drone of “Stracenska 612,” in which a repetitive keyboard figure forms a base for an equally repetitive guitar riff over which all manner of feedback, keyboard blips, subliminal vocal chatter are laid, topped off with pleasantly melodic lead vocal. That the sounds on Com Plex were generated entirely by relative youngsters Brandon Summers and Benjamin Weikel is quite a feat - many full bands would struggle to create music this intricate. Com Plex, the first album from Portland’s Helio Sequence, is an impressive affair, a swirling, heavily layered slice of space rock which draws on the entire history of psychedelia, from the Beatles through krautrock to shoegazing and ambient techno.

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