For Helium's frontwoman Mary Timony, The Magic City is more than just a pretty album title.

It's a place --whether real or fictional -- where she says she goes every now and again when she needs to get away.

"The name represents the place that a lot of the songs take place in," said Timony, the band's vocalist, guitarist and fantasy-filled songwriter. "The words describe what the landscape looks like. A lot of the songs are about looking off into the distance at this beautiful land that exists far away."

Like the name, the music on the recently released The Magic City, a strange concoction of psychedelia and drone, in many ways exists elsewhere in time and space. The lyrics reveal a Helium that floats somewhere above our atmosphere. In "The Aging Astronauts" (RealAudio excerpt), Timony slips into a world not unlike David Bowie's character Major Tom from his classic "Space Oddity," singing "I count the stars almost every day/ The aging astronauts have floated away."

Beyond the music, the trio, including bassist Ash Bowie and drummer Shawn Devlin, is memorable for the images Timony brings to life in her songs. Moog and distortion aside, Timony keeps writing about the fantastic landscapes she imagines, taking her songs through multiple surreal dimensions.

To that end, Helium offer "Vibrations," with lyrics straight out of a fairy tale.

"I saw you turn into a butterfly/ whose heart was smaller than a star in

the sky/ that disappeared when it started to snow/ I thought I told you, it's

time for me to go."

With The Magic City, Timony, who is in her 20s, takes Helium to the edge of grooviness, flirting with trippy, yet natural-sounding instruments. "We tried to have a lot of acoustic-sounding keyboards," she explained. "We used this thing called a Chamberlain a lot, which has recordings of strings and horns -- it's really old. A lot of the record is from that instrument."

Some of Helium's new sounds came from their collaboration with producer

Mitch Easter, known for his work with bands such as R.E.M. and Pavement. Easter, who recorded the band in his own studio, collects a range of unusual instruments, some of which found their way onto the album. "Definitely, the instruments he has influenced the record," Timony said. "But he also has really good suggestions."

Easter not only lent the instruments, but made a guest appearance on The Magic City, plucking his mandolin and strumming his guitar on the mournful "Lullaby of the Moths." "He's awesome to work with," Timony said, smiling. "It shaped the album a whole bunch."

All of this space-age groove is quite a step from Helium's noisy, sometimes raucous debut album, The Dirt of Luck. "We just tried to get away from distortion," Timony said of the trademark fuzz that governed Dirt.

When Helium released Dirt, the band had built more of an indie-rock cult following, especially among the younger crowd, she added. "A lot of high school

kids just followed us and came to our shows -- alterna-kids," Timony said. "It was just alternative music. That was why people came to the shows."

And while she acknowledges that not everybody likes Helium's new direction, Timony said she is pleased.

"It was time to change," she said. "I think that as we get older as a

band, the audience is becoming people that we like more, that I can relate to

more," Timony said. "I think the audience is there more because of our

music. I think the music's better."