Brandon Summers and Benjamin Weikel are quite young -- young enough that, when My Bloody Valentine's seminal Loveless was released, they must have purchased it with birthday money. Or allowance. Or perhaps a big jar of pennies.

It's clear, though, that Loveless somehow fell into their hands...for ten years later, Summers and Weikel, aka The Helio Sequence, have produced an album that takes Loveless as its starting point and expands outward into a galaxy full of white noise and classic pop harmony.

The voyage begins with "Stracenska 612", which incorporates calming elements of chillout ambience into its initial approach, then drops a whirlwind of shifting, writhing, scraping feedback. "Just Mary Jane (Calypso)" offers a missing link between the Manchester sound and the shoegazer tunes that followed on its heels, slathering each instrument with a rippling coating of electronic interference. The band continues in this vein, touching on every early-nineties trend that didn't develop in Seattle. Glorious slabs of ambient feedback loom and collide like icebergs on "My Heart", gradually blossoming in a haze of New Order melody.

In short, Com Plex is one of those curiously hybridized albums that can't decide if it wants to be quiet or loud, calming or exiting. And so it sits in the middle, leaving the listener on the brink of blissful sleep one second and electrified with nerve-jangling energy the next.

Though informed by Loveless' style, Summers and Weikel favor thick, rich melodies over the brittle crunchiness of Kevin Shields' production. Their vocal style, too, is more assertive, the delivery more aggressive and declamatory than the sleepy swoon of shoegazer incantation. Even the softest, squelchiest songs do not suggest that the duo are stifling their own yawns.

There's one obvious misstep here: buoyed by the success of their own songs, The Helio Sequence opt to tackle the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows". Nobody ever gets this one quite right; most bands either wind up sounding too much like the Beatles or losing the thread of the song entirely. Weikel and Summers make a spirited effort, pouring energy into the crashing guitars, but they just can't make "Tomorrow Never Knows" their own. Perhaps no-one can.

This is a minor setback. As a whole, Com Plex takes Shields' work as a foundation and makes a sincere attempt to build higher. It's difficult to write music in this vein and come across as anything other than an MBV knockoff, but these guys are clearly trying to take their own steps in new directions. As impressed as I am with the Helio Sequence's achievements, I'm even more impressed that they've come so early. Summers and Weikel are kids, barely into their twenties. Can you imagine the music they could be making in five years?