Cord Changes

When Helio Sequence performs live, it's hard to believe sometimes that it's only two people making all that noise.

Especially now.

Now, vocalist/guitarist Brandon Summers' vocals, solid and strong, bear no sign of the fact that, for a long stretch during the four years between 2004's Love and Distance and this year's Keep Your Eyes Ahead, his primary instrument, his voice, had stopped cooperating entirely.

"It was somewhere in Europe," recalls drummer Benjamin Weikel, the other half of the Helio Sequence.

"We had gone from L.A. all the way across the States to N.Y. and then to Europe and back," adds Summers. "It was really strange times; the record [Love and Distance] had just come out, and I spent two years away from my wife, and it was getting to the end of that, which was really difficult."

Fearing he had developed nodes on his vocal cords (which would mean his voice would be permanently damaged), Summers returned home from tour to find that, luckily, his cords were just extremely strained. He was ordered to quit speaking for at least two months and began an intense recovery process that included everything from refraining from drinking liquor and mint tea to taking a more stripped-down, back-to-basics approach to creating his music.

"There was this day that I went out record shopping, and I didn't know what I was doing with myself, and I picked up a copy of The Times They Are A-Changin'," he says. "I brought it home and was like, 'I've heard Dylan before. It's just another Dylan record.' But I just remember sitting there listening to that record and just being blown away. It was timing. It hit me right, and it hit me deep."

Meanwhile, Summers' focus on finding and strengthening his voice again often meant hours spent alone with an acoustic guitar. As a result, Keep Your Eyes Ahead, while still retaining much of the same sonic layering of previous Helio Sequence endeavors, is punctuated with tracks that sound as though they could have been penned at the Chelsea Hotel in the late '60s.

Midway through the album, the stark, acoustic finger-picking of "Shed Your Love" draws listeners in. Summers' vocals, sounding stronger than ever, are showcased boldly in the mix with minimalist background atmospherics. "Drank the dark wine of the New York night/A shattered mind across the borderline/Spent the night in someone else's arms/Shed your love/Shed your love," he sings in a gentle, husky, nasal twang that more than hints at his newfound admiration for Dylan.

Intimate gems like this one are packed tightly amidst Helio Sequence doing what they do best; the majority of the record is heavy with driving, dense rockers like "Lately" and the title track, in which Weikel's percussion and orchestration talents dominate. But what sets this record apart from the Helio Sequence's previous albums is the balance between the harder songs and the quieter, stripped-down moments like "Shed Your Love."

"You listen to the first song and the last song...there's somebody that lost something there," says drummer Weikel. "But at the end, [it feels like] there's some sort of understanding or revelation."

"There is a lot of loss [on the album]," Summers agrees. "But I don't believe that something can be lost forever."