"a timely reminder that Beard has one of the most powerful and versatile voices in Oxford" ['Magpie/Beast' review]
FLIGHTS OF HELIOS ‘Magpie’ / ‘Beast’ (Self released) Following their long awaited debt album, 'Endings’, in January, Flights of Helios bookend 2018 it with this new single, 'Magpie’ inspired by Alan Moore’s Unearthing and finding the band in unusually tense and urgent mood, singer Chris Beard almost reprising the uptight delivery of his previous bands Harry Angel and These Are Our Demands over an understatedly frenzied outpouring of guitar fuzz that the band themselves accurately link back to Echo & the Bunnymen’s 'The Cutter’. It’s a timely reminder that Beard has one of the most powerful and versatile voices in Oxford, capable of both languorous, almost hymnal serenity and, as here, a wired intensity, like someone’s fed Anohni a bag of speed and recruited her into a gothic post-punk band. Chris is back to more relaxed musings on 'Beast’, even as he’s contemplating the nature of humanity, musically the band stepping back from the earlier brink to swim in calmer waters, part shoegaze swoon and shimmer, part post-rock abstraction and part elegant folksiness. Ian Chesterton