Day 3: The Helio Sequence – Keep Your Eyes Ahead

I was pretty fortunate to pull this album this morning, I must say. Which is an odd thing to say, because until I started in on it this morning I hated these guys.

A few months ago, right when I got to Seattle, I went to see The Walkmen at Showbox. They’ve been one of my favorite bands for a while now; they’ve gotten me through some damned unpleasant times, and their You & Me on repeat soundtracked the writing of the latter half of my novel. I was looking forward to the show for months beforehand. I showed up a bit early so that I could get up nice and close, and was relieved to find there was only going to be one opener.

The Helio Sequence took stage, and stepped into the unenviable position of being the only thing standing between me and something I was excited and impatient for. The band consisted of a drummer and a guitarist/singer. They both looked uninteresting and proceeded to play some shitty repetitive guitar-pedal music like where the guitarist hits a note and it sounds like a chorus of dolphins complaining about the sardines they just received. The vocals sounded like the guy from Sunny Day Real Estate and it had no movement or passion. Overall I hated it and it was very shitty. The only saving grace to their unbearably tedious set was the drummer. Once he began playing his faced locked into a grim rictus, like a laughing skull baring all its teeth and straining against the definition of a smile. He played wonderfully, and was hypnotic to watch. Almost as if to caricaturize the term “drum machine” his movements were rigidly mechanical. In playing he’d move his limbs flamboyantly to hit the different parts of his set, and then repeat it exactly each bar, showing no emotion. It reminded me of watching a TV special about robotic arms assembling Nissans.

It was really friggin’ entertaining.

But I was growing increasingly upset with each new song they started, and then when the singer busted out one of those harmonica holders like Dylan used and added some harmonica flourishes to a couple of the songs, I got really fed up. These 18 year olds in front of me were absolutely being robbed of the entirety of their wits; they were ramming their pelvises against the stage and slapping each other and jumping up and down, and singing along so loudly I could hear them better than the band. I was almost more annoyed by them than I was the band.

Finally, they announced they only had two more songs. The end was in sight. Eventually The Walkmen came on, and their set list only contained two songs from the album that made them a band that I like (really exacerbating my pre-existing bad mood, you can imagine).

Ever since then, I totally forgot about The Helio Sequence until I got the suggestion to put them on my list. I fired up the album as I left the house to catch an Amtrak bus to visit friends for the holidays. As I stepped out of the house into the bracing cold and crunched through the brittle snow, the first track kicked on. And goddamn. From the moment the drums started and the guitars materialized, the music just thrilled and invigorated me. I was probably still a bit blunted due to all the Anal Cunt the day before; I listened to that shit for probably 13 hours out of that day.

I got to my bus, settled into my chair, and tried to read, but the music just consumed me. It was exquisitely soothing. As the bus got on the highway bound for eastern Washington and entered some really lovely scenery, I was so blissed out I fell asleep, and the music took me down like a lullaby and spooned with me and then made me breakfast when I woke up. It was goddamn perfect.

It made me curious to see how quickly my perception could change about something like this. This is pretty indisputably good music. They have been at it for nearly a decade, if I remember correctly, and have put a lot of heart and craft into it. It sounds entirely like things I like. Yet when they got on stage in front of hundreds of people and did me the honor of performing it, I self-centeredly ignored it, cast it aside, and hated it, because I was so impatient to get to the part I had wanted to see in the first place.

It made me wonder about older times. Back to the days of chamber music, for instance. What if the only time you could even hear music was when a bunch of people got together and performed it for you? Fast forward to now: I have 90 gigs of music. I forget the exact count but it’s got to be at least a month of music. I can conjure any of it up at any moment and dismiss it at an equally indifferent whim; what does this do to the way I perceive music as a thing in the first place? When I got my first CD, it was the only CD I owned. I could listen the shit out of it and never get tired of it. Same with the first MP3s I ever got. They were scarce in those days and I had maybe five of them. I could listen to them all day even if they weren’t even the songs I liked by that band.

A kid next to me on the bus had his iPhone kickin’ out some jams. I watched the album art change every couple of minutes. Gucci Mane, Sleigh Bells, some other stuff I genuinely like. But I could tell he wasn’t even finishing most of the songs; he changed every other minute or so. He was biting off half of the steak that a musician had spent days poring over in the studio, tweaking and perfecting, and throwing the rest of the steak in the trash.

On the other hand, I was savoring every single bite of an album by a band that months earlier I had impugned with disgust in favor of something else I ended up being dissatisfied with anyway. And I only was allowing myself to accept the music that was being given me because I had no options; I didn’t have the thought of what else I could be instantly listening to instead. This was all I had, and I, being an obsessive lover of music, someone whose brain needs that stimulus, was overjoyed to have it.

P.S., this album’s The Captive Mind is just a fucking ruthlessly good song. I do not ever want to stop listening to it. I envy those 18-year-olds at the show who got this album around the time they were driving around in their parents’ cars way past their bedtimes and telling stories about what they wanna do after college and trying to work up the nerve to take each others’ hands.