Boston multi-instrumentalist Keith Kenniff's second release under his Helios moniker is a soundtrack of molasses-sweet, midsummer sunset melancholy and pastoral mellifluence. You remember the tire swing that swayed gently from the outstretched arm of her grandmother's oak tree as you sat with her on a hill, on a blanket, calling forth the rapture of one of those endless late July twilights. What could once prolong childhood indefinitely was the promise of staying awake and wide-eyed late enough to glimpse the first night's star with her as it manifested itself far from the city lights. To the strains and slow guided charge of "Coast Off," you took her hand and both broke off into a gallop into the tall grass below, not so much as a spur of the moment act, but as the fruition of a declaration of hope, slowly gestating since age five when you first recognized beauty as a pair of delicate green eyes. It's not the trembling guitar line and softly scorched drum loop of "Halving The Compass" you're hearing now these many years later, but the flashlight-illuminated creek bed where you gave her an old olive jar as a gift and called it a firefly collector. She poked holes in the top so they could breathe, as you had forgotten to, and it is the essence of this care for the oneness of the living condition that you still search for somehow in every pair of eyes you meet. Time did run out on it all like the never placated bully that it is. Things get complicated. The world and weights and strains. She fell asleep on the porch swing and you watched her breathe as the sun rose with the last chimings of "Emancipation." What would anything meaningful ever be without the longings of it in its absence? Of course, you were still too young to come to any sort of universal realizations, and still years away from the gradual recession into memory. She just looked beautiful in her slumber, and even if it's all that it ever really was, well, most people should only be so lucky to receive such peace.
1. Bless This Morning Year
2. Halving The Compass
3. Dragonfly Across An Ancient Sky
4. Vargtimme
5. For Years And Years
6. Coast Off
7. Paper Tiger
8. First Dream Called Ocean
9. The Toy Garden
10. Sons Of Light And Darkness
11. Emancipation
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