So lots of Liz Harris’ vocals coil down a winding path, beckoning listeners to path them simply earlier than they vanish round a nook. Take “Disengaged,” or “Alien Observer,” or “Clearing”: In all these songs from her solo venture Grouper, the Oregon-based musician retains singing previous the purpose the place a extra typical lyricist may dip right into a line break. Her darkly psychedelic accumulations let their language sprawl. On Linda’s Head, the second album from the shoegaze energy trio Helen, Harris delivers a number of the most succinct and percussive couplets of her profession. “I prefer it/And I need this,” she declares on “Starline,” an affirmation so unequivocal it might have been plucked from just about any chart hit at any level in recording historical past.
Helen, the Pacific Northwestern ensemble of Harris, Scott Simmons, and Jed Bindeman, launched its stormy debut, The Unique Faces, in 2015. That album drew Simmons’ bass and Bindeman’s drums to the fore of the combination, letting Harris’ guitar and vocals foam behind the rhythm part’s discrete peaks. Few of her phrases survived the torrents of sound wherein they had been immersed; as with sure Grouper recordings, the lyrics emerged as texture greater than syntax. Greater than a decade later, Linda’s Head largely reverses that technique. Whereas it definitely retains the spaciousness and fog of Grouper, Simmons’ band the Lavender Flu, and Bindeman’s group Everlasting Tapestry, the album additionally eases additional towards providing up lyrics like talismans: fragments you possibly can keep in mind and switch over in your thoughts lengthy after the report involves an in depth.
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All through its brisk runtime, Linda’s Head retains its eyes educated on the sky. That is an album filled with stars, storms, and horizons, the depths of seen coloration vibrating in invisible air. The galloping “limitless Sky” sends Harris’ voice fluttering in layers over Simmons’ insistent and swampy bass: “Fly away,” she implores, “again to the start.” The environment of “darkblue” oscillates between hazy stillness and pummeling froth, whereas “Lifeless shark II” romps with all of the verve of a Sundays single aerosolized throughout an unlimited shoreline. On the sugar-encrusted “Starline,” Harris gently floats the report’s thematic core: “The sky is my house,” she asserts, her voice as weightless as if she’d already left the bottom far under. Eight-and-a-half-minute nearer “Canyon” seals the album’s connection to the pure world as a drum roll slowly provides solution to samples of thunder, the mechanical imitation of the sky’s rumble paling beside the true factor.
