The end of funhouse filth: Helium's turned on to radio

HELIUM

No Guitars EP (Matador)

It's a rare artist who can elevate posing to an aesthetic principle. But what was precisely so compelling about Helium's last full-length release, 1995's The Dirt of Luck, was that nothing seemed to fit right: Mary Timony's sweet and brittle guitar lines fought for air amidst all the spooky atmospherics--fuzzy microphone distortion, carnival funhouse sound effects, portentous drumming--while her dusky voice strained against both a proliferation of high notes and awkward lyrical phrasing. The overarching theme of The Dirt of Luck, and of its predecessor, Pirate Prude (1994), was one of contamination, of corruption by love and desire, of the inherent dirtiness of female sexuality. Timony is fixated on the Victorian madonna-or-whore conceit, so it's perfect that her music is marked by disjointed artifice: in her world, one of too-strict categories of virtue that women must fit themselves to, every girl is a poseur. While not all of us bought her allegorical feminist schtick--her interpretation of gender conflicts is as simplistic as the categories she critiques--her music's persona, that of a pretty girl in a pretty dress with a filthy mouth, was undeniably fascinating. The only question left after Dirt was, what next would she do with that persona?

No Guitars answers: she abjects it. On "Silver Strings," the first of the EP's six songs, Timony is all grown up: backed by dreamy, liquid slide guitar, she's a chanteuse who wraps her wispy vocals around each note with breathy abandon. The pitch slumps a bit, but the same complaint could be made of Nico, and would be as irrelevant. Her tone and the song's pace shift abruptly at the chorus: "I've got the radio, baby," she sings, and she does indeed sound like some avenging FM heroine, replete with cowbell, handclaps, and a standard-issue aggro-rock guitar solo. Producer Mitch Easter, who provides the aforementioned opiate guitar work, has his fingerprints all over "Silver Strings"; his dense, textured production recalls his work for the Loud Family, and gives flesh and muscle to Timony's fragile melodies.

But if a Helium song is fleshed and muscular, then is it still a Helium song? The nimble, trebly guitar of "Dragon #2" skips its way up the scale with Timony's voice, jarringly out of synch with the haunted "awful lullaby" of the lyrics. It's the kind of juxtaposition Timony constructs best, but her lyrics, always tending toward the dubious side--this is the woman who framed an entire song around her similarities to a SuperBall--fall a little flat when unchecked by the Gothic ambiance of the earlier records. But Timony, admirably, seems intent on a new sound, achieved with the Day-Glo chamber orchestra strains of "Sunday" and the flutey buoyancy of "The King of Electric Guitars."

The sixth and last song, "Riddle of the Chamberlin," is like an indie "Symphony of Sorrows," edging closer and closer to anti-climax as it builds to its peak, with water-torture drumming and pulsating guitars. The song finally implodes, and Timony's soprano emerges from its ashes to announce a new one. "Riddle of the Chamber-lin" may prove emblematic of Timony's intentions for her band: if this EP is a preview of things to come, then we can look forward to a yet-unseen sunny, poppy side of Helium. It's a new day for Mary Timony. It is left to be seen whether she's still posing.

--Jessica Winter

Back to A & E...