Taking their space rock / shoegaze sound and inexplicably making it even more intense, their new EP Gehenna confirms what their live sets suggest: Helicon just get better and better.
Build it up and knock it down. Helicon make a Colosseum of noise loosely characterised as Brian Jonestown Massacre meets Hawkwind. With three guitarists, a bass player and a sitarist this is a big team, but for once an abundance of guitars is a blessing, not merely a case of having too many people on stage. Helicon take as much pride in smashing the sonic architecture they assemble, bringing ruin and desolation to the empires they create from dust.
‘In A Sad Red Dusk’ starts starker than previous Helicon songs but soon takes shape as the slowly brewed walls of buzzing noises we know and love assemble and take flight. A quicksilver riff that would have sounded at home on Methodrone lands along with epic post rock drums. The result is a Viking death march from a movie that could never be filmed.
‘Heavy Black Hole Jets’ serves as a gateway for the next song, powering up the engines and making sure everyone is strapped in safe and sound. The repeated title gives the song a Dead Skeletons’ style mantra fuelled hypnosis. Full power achieved? Ladies And Gentlemen…
‘We’re Gaun Tae The Moon’. In many ways feels like the epitome of everything that Helicon stands for, a rippling, noxious oozing mass of guitars. Hypnotically trance inducing, queasily trippy. At the 4 minute mark, when you thought it was already pretty intense, they turn the screws and ratchet the pressure to breaking point. Now a seething, broiling mass of music, Helicon cruise this fucker through space and time.
Watch the video or live at Gullivers, Manchester.
Dispatching the competition one by one, Helicon are, in their own carefree style, gunning for the conquest of space rock.
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