So many of Liz Harris’ vocals coil down a winding path, beckoning listeners to trail them just before they vanish around a corner. Take “Disengaged,” or “Alien Observer,” or “Clearing”: In all these songs from her solo project Grouper, the Oregon-based musician keeps singing past the point where a more conventional lyricist might dip into a line break. Her darkly psychedelic accumulations let their language sprawl. On Linda’s Head, the second album from the shoegaze power trio Helen, Harris delivers some of the most succinct and percussive couplets of her career. “I like it/And I want this,” she declares on “Starline,” an affirmation so unequivocal it could have been plucked from pretty much any chart hit at any point in recording history.
Helen, the Pacific Northwestern ensemble of Harris, Scott Simmons, and Jed Bindeman, released its stormy debut, The Original Faces, in 2015. That album drew Simmons’ bass and Bindeman’s drums to the fore of the mix, letting Harris’ guitar and vocals foam behind the rhythm section’s discrete peaks. Few of her words survived the torrents of sound in which they were immersed; as with certain Grouper recordings, the lyrics emerged as texture more than syntax. More than a decade later, Linda’s Head largely reverses that strategy. While it certainly retains the spaciousness and fog of Grouper, Simmons’ band the Lavender Flu, and Bindeman’s group Eternal Tapestry, the album also eases further toward offering up lyrics like talismans: fragments you can remember and turn over in your mind long after the record comes to a close.
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Throughout its brisk runtime, Linda’s Head keeps its eyes trained on the sky. This is an album full of stars, storms, and horizons, the depths of visible color vibrating in invisible air. The galloping “endless Sky” sends Harris’ voice fluttering in layers over Simmons’ insistent and swampy bass: “Fly away,” she implores, “back to the beginning.” The atmosphere of “darkblue” oscillates between hazy stillness and pummeling froth, while “Dead shark II” romps with all the verve of a Sundays single aerosolized across a vast coastline. On the sugar-encrusted “Starline,” Harris gently floats the record’s thematic core: “The sky is my home,” she asserts, her voice as weightless as if she’d already left the ground far below. Eight-and-a-half-minute closer “Canyon” seals the album’s connection to the natural world as a drum roll slowly gives way to samples of thunder, the mechanical imitation of the sky’s rumble paling beside the real thing.
