Album review: Homeshake – Helium
Homeshake’s new album, Helium, opens with what sounds like robotic birds chirping, as if we’re waking up in a spaceship. This brief first track – aptly titled “Early” – takes its time, easing us into the album’s dreamy atmosphere with slow chimes, dissonant chords, and a simple, wandering melody. The song feels like a Saturday morning stretch; if we’re on a spaceship, it’s on the most laid-back mission in history. Montreal-based singer-songwriter Peter Sagar helms this vessel, and he’s got his feet propped up on the dashboard.
“Early” nudges us into the rest of the album with the kind of shimmery noise that usually accompanies an animated twinkle (think a My Little Pony commercial). I had high hopes. Sagar’s lazy voice and syrupy beats filled his last three albums with music begging to be put on somebody’s “chill vibes” playlist – lyrically uncomplicated music that wafts through the air and infuses whatever you’re doing (for much of Homeshake’s fanbase, likely smoking a joint) with downtempo calm. But as the first half of Helium straddles the thin line between calming and boring, it leans towards the latter.
Sagar’s writing has always been detached (his first album features a song called simply Okay). He continues this tradition here, tossing “probablys,” “shoulds,” “maybes,” and “I guesses” into his music to create a soundscape of passivity that quickly wears out its welcome. On three separate tracks – “Anything at All,” “Just Like My,” and “All Night Long” – Sagar verbalizes his wish to sit at home and do…absolutely nothing. Assuming that the “you” he wants to stagnate with in “Anything at All” refers to his girlfriend, it’s a sweet sentiment. The idea of being so happy with somebody that their presence alone captivates is a relatable one, but the composition is too thin to express something as wieldy as contentment in love–the lyrics even weaker–and so the song falls flat. Sagar’s music denies us a glimpse into the inner workings of his relationship, merely tells us that it’s fully satisfying. From the outside, it sounds lifeless.
In a 2017 interview, Sagar mused that he used to use sadness “as a crutch for getting into an emotional state so that [he] had something to say.” But abandoning its signature melancholy seems to have stripped Homeshake’s music of feeling. “I need something medium,” yawns Sagar on “Just Like My.” I disagree. The middle ground in which many of the songs on Helium live is noncommittal and aseptic, desperate for a dose of passion. Sagar has produced music that renders inactivity compelling before; on “Give It to Me,” one of the band’s most popular tracks, he plays with pitch and vocal layering to sex up a song mainly comprised of the four words in its title. Much of Helium, however, fails to achieve the same, a Seinfeld-esque baseline proving inadequate to make Sagar’s half-hearted musing about what it would be like to sing like Mariah Carey much more interesting than a passing thought.
Past the midpoint of the album, Sagar injects much-needed warmth into his music. In “Other Than,” softly reverberating guitar notes and siren oscillating between soft and loud back Sagar’s voice, which replies to his sighed rhetorical question “Is it gonna work out?” with a comforting “Sure it is.” And the “Salu Says Hi” takes us on a whimsical, wordless one-minute foray into a Tamagotchi’s brain, again proof that Homeshake doesn’t need poetic lyrics to create an absorbing track. But Helium, bogged down by its subject matter and listless arrangements, doesn’t make it far off the ground.
Review by Bessie Rubinstein.
