At last?!?! This is a most wonderful album. It’s both really fast and really beautiful. At the very same time. Hut and Lift are but wonderful. As is Pilots Requiem. Not to mention Beati. However, my personal question/wondering is how much is Grand Ol’ Man cKey on this release, really…? He isn’t as present in the music as he used to be from what I can tell after having listened to his stuff since 1983… I might be wrong, but I’m damn’ sure I’m right. Download is someone else’s chief project these days… Don’t really care, though, it’s good listening, even for me. A quite fresh production in my estimation…

The new downLOAD is CRUNchy, criSPY and FUNky. I would link HElicopTEr with the dark industrial/analog aggressiveness of the early downLOAD noise beat era, the playful, psychedelic and light-hearted IDM/techno of III and Effector, the great dynamics of FiXer + the new analog/mind-bending retro-quality of the bubbling sounds used. Furthermore, Phil Western's Kone albums and some of his solo-under-his-own-name stuff's esoteric signature can be felt in many parts throughout. As a matter of fact, I feel confident this will become a classic downLOAD album, because it has everything the band is appreciated for, from most eras though in a distilled, i.e. purified form. Under the apparent simplicity of the beating structures, however, whenever you follow the inner and outer details, you soon notice the many variations, nuances, textures, main lines, sub lines, types of beat per minutes, sismic oscillations, splashing bursts, distanced voices, echoes of echoes of echoes, etc. The band admitted to the fact that it is a highly improvisational album, the closest we could get to a live electronics jam from the legendary duo of Phil Western and cEvin Key. I say mission accomplished. A special mention goes to Mark Spybey's presence on the dreamy and subconscious Beati, one of the most beautiful compositions from the band's (almost) original lineup. Very experi-'mental' shit, it's already one of my favorite downLOAD album! Many critical individuals have complained about the loud and apparently pounding beat nature of HElicopTEr's intense music. Well, I say, if you don't like loud, intense and pounding beat, why are you listening to downLOAD anyway? Hail to the Bubbling Psychedelism of Nuclear Fusion Groove. Taken from avantgarde-metal.com - http://www.avantgarde-metal.com/content/stories2.php?id=150

There is no let up, no break in the assault committed to disc that is 'Helicopter'. Phil Western and Cevin Key have set the controls for the heart of sun, via a black hole coming up from behind and swallowing it. Nightmarishly precise sequencing jumps the time space continuum to meet up with iconoclastic programming in the dervishly danceable beats.You who own this thing, be brave, entreat your friends to listen and purchase. If this does not nail the coffin of Stanley Pain shut once and for all, nothing will. Subconscious Communications are doing some dastardly fine work, the years spent in hushed tones cannot endure forever. Not with work like this tapping and then shattering the glass houses musical preconceptions dwell within.Is it techno, is it minimal, is it idm, is it house, is it dub, is it experimental, is it avante garde, is it is it is it WHAT IS IT. Download, that's what it is. The sounds are drawn from vintage equipment but there's nothing archaic about this record. Ohgr fans will no doubt pass on this, which is to be expected and sneeringly laughed at. The rest of us will be trying to wrap our minds around Download's newest for quite a long time. It is THAT good.From start to finish it does not give any breathing room. You are in the trenches, you are in the compartmentalized unlivable inhospitable urban malaise and you cannot help but love it. To listen to this album is not to partake but to submit to sonic misanthropy, don't try fighting back... be overtaken, be subsumed in the waves of maelstromic tide shifts and tectonic rupture.

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