The story of this first Echo Helstrom recording:
This record was recorded in the early hours of the morning at the Laurence Gallery in NW Portland OR in 2002 or 2003. It was recorded in around one week with mostly single takes and engineered by Tahlia Harrison. With little to no money but a fierce determination to make music, the band locked themselves in this Pearl District art gallery overnight after working long days at their day jobs. Although very proud of this recording, the band considers this to be more of a demo than an album, since time and resources were scarce and ideas were not able to be fleshed out as much as desired. One track that Ross is particularly proud of but can't perform due to its emotional intensity is "Floor 104". Special thanks to Tahlia Harrison for making this happen. It surely wouldn't exist without her hard work and belief in the band.
This record, once it sells out (and it is down to less than 50 copies), will not be reprinted.
Here are some reviews of the album from back in the day:
An Echo worth hearing again
By Joseph Gallivan Issue date: 3/21/2003
The Tribune
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Sometimes it seems like everyone in Portland is in a band - usually a quartet that dreams of playing the Paris Theater while churning out three-chord sludge in a damp basement.
That's why the birth of Echo Helstrom is a blessing. In fact, until you hear this group, it's easy to think of its members as a bunch of soft-spoken music students.
In the recording studio, singer-songwriter Ross Seligman listens closely as his violin player, Alessandra Dinu, lays down a track for the band's debut CD. Dinu plays the way her classical training has taught her to, with supreme control, producing a rich, lush sound.
In a glass-fronted closet, Will Amend bows an upright bass. As the song "Floor 104" comes to an end, however, Dinu and the bassist's tunes descend into a two-minute outro of ugly chaos.
It's a take. Seligman loves it.
After the deluge of weak art produced in response to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Floor 104 is a joy, a beautiful, passionate piece that roots the listener to the spot.
It's not really a Sept. 11 song, he's quick to point out: "It's a tribute to my stepbrother."
Cantor Fitzgerald employee Laurence Polatsch, 32, did not escape the 104th floor of the World Trade Center in New York the day the twin towers fell. Seligman says the death of his fun-loving relative and friend left him feeling like a zombie for four months.
Eventually, "Floor 104" emerged.
"It wasn't for anyone else to hear," he says. "It was just to get it out and move on."
Seligman's songs are poetic without lapsing into obscurity, which is partly the influence of such heroes as Neil Finn, Jeff Buckley and Bob Dylan. The band sounds like early REM but with more passion, or like Coldplay with an orchestra.
On "Math of God," you can feel the emotion rising in Seligman. And on "I'm Changing," a foot-stomper "about being 25 in a crumbling world, petrified of my own government," this bunch sound like they have stadium anthem potential.
For years Seligman played in other people's bands (such as local bossa nova outfit Blanket Music), too self-conscious to play or sing the dozens of songs that were piling up in his notebooks.
He arrived in Portland from his native New Jersey to study music at Portland State University. On the way he lived in a tiny trailer in someone's driveway in Ireland's Aran Islands while studying Celtic music and jamming with heroes such as Donal Lunny.
In 2002 he took the plunge and put together his dream rock band, with classically trained musicians who were willing to take his ideas and run with them.
"I wanted a violin," he says, "but not like the Dave Matthews Band. I wanted it to be symphonic, beautiful. It was uncanny: In just three weeks, I found everyone."
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This Portland based three piece makes use of a bowed bass and violin along with the guitar to create a hauntingly beautiful sound that should immediately captivate anyone who enjoys a sound dominated by the beauty of strings. But this isn't chamber music, nor will it soothe and lull you to sleep. It's haunting quality in no way disguises the underlying indie rock appeal of this 2003 offering.
--- South of Mainstream Review
I'm a sucker for strings in a rock band. I get the sense that the incorporation of strings - primarily cello or violin, but occasionally full string quartets or more - is like the addition to keyboards to rock at one time: startling in the almost limitless possibilities, but eventually, when everyone was doing it, how unique could it be? It seems that, these past two years or so, more bands are adding strings to their repertoire as a way to be different, and it's easy to see that trend becoming passe, because few make the instrument(s) a vital part of the ensemble.
Portland, Oregon-based Echo Helstrom, on the other hand, puts as much emphasis on Alessandra Dinu's violin as frontman (and Blanket Music guitarist) Ross Seligman's guitar. (The band is rounded out by Will Amend on bass and Mike McDaniel on drums.) With Seligman's voice and guitar (most often acoustic) mixing with the violin, the songs have a bit of a symphonic quality that the stringed instrument inevitably brings, but it's done in a very unique, poppy setting that brings to mind the mid-90s college-rock of bands like REM and Sordid Humor with a more modern, soaring quality that's highly infectious.
-- Delusions of Adequacy Review
I always enjoy stumbling across a disc that fulfills a need I didn't know I had. In this case, Echo Helstrom have answered the question, "Why aren't there any decent orchestral rock bands on my radar these days?" before I could even ask it.
Full disclosure: I gravitate toward the visual, toward music with either a driving rhythm or an epic grandeur. Apparently the foursome that comprise Echo Helstrom do as well, and decided to mesh those interests into one musical venture. Bass and violin intertwine in the shadows while vocalist/guitarist Ross Seligman plows through the spotlight with an unpolished, just-shy-of-the-limelight delivery and an ear for geek-chic lyrics. Echo Helstrom know that musings like "Can I help you fix your wings / I've got crazy glue and duct tape" sound far less sophomoric when sung in harmony above a string section. Consider them your geek art band of the week that just might stick around.
It's not taking the easy way out to suggest that Echo Helstrom's musical genre-hopping makes a thumbnail review nearly impossible. Everyone from the White Stripes to the Moody Blues seems to wander through this disc at one point or another as the band veers from arena rock to rural folk, chamber music to postmodernism. Sometimes they do it all in the same song, like the otherwise-unassuming "Appletree", which is capped off by Seligman's Neil Diamond-esque bellow. One track later he's cribbing Ben Folds's disaffected warble on "Where I Sleep", singing of lost loves in the death camp of New York, and Mike McDaniels breaks up the reverie with an unprovoked machine-gunning of his drums that's later matched by violinist Alessandra Dinu. Then, suddenly, we're off into Peter Gunn territory as Dinu and bassist Will Amend circle each other like an acoustic car chase, and -- did I mention we're still on the same track?
This is the kind of disc I hope is some day remastered because the overall acoustics could use some sweetening; the drums in particular seem to fade far further into the background than intended. The good news is, this is the kind of disc that deserves to be remastered some day, in a trendster-heavy re-release that sees Echo Helstrom's fans playing hooky from their day jobs to catch the reunion tour, Mission of Burma style. Sure, they'll have to build that fan base first, but listen to this intelligent, passionate, engaging and occasionally astounding disc and then tell me with a straight face that they don't deserve one.
-- Justin Kownacki
Splendid E-zine review 8/24/04
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