It was "Lucy" that did it. We were in New York, at Helium's sparsely attended NMS shocase -50-odd souls clustered in a room the size of a small planet, and all drifting distractedly around the trio onstage. Then suddenly, something clicked, something that built from an opening line - "Lucy says boredom is the biggest word she's ever heard... the biggest word" and blam. The band exploded on cue, while Mary Timony brought new meaning to the expression "guitar duel" by swordfighting a roadie with her shrieking instrument. The crowd were no longer strangers, the band were no longer unknowns. We caught something special that night in NYC, but when I compared notes with other people later, it appeared that something special every time Helium play, and every time Timony opens her mouth onstage. Helium are that rare find-a band which transcends just about every genre you can think of, which is racing off into some great rock 'n' roll stratosphere and doesn't give a damn for the conventions we grew up with. It's an indefinable thing; the Velvets had it, Nirvana have it, the Stones at least knew what it was. I want to say Helium are "breaking the rules", but even that's not right. It's almost as if they're not even aware that there are any rules to be broken. They've been compared to PJ Harvey and Come, but that vision is loose, limited, and strangely Anglocentric. Helium are an American band through. Brian Dunton and drummer Shawn King Devlin are ex-Dumptruck and sometimes still involve with Tacklebox, while Timony is undiluted mid-80's D.C. hard-core. Ignore the matricidal homogeny of their base-town Boston, and the combination makes apple pie look imported. They've been together eighteen months, and since then, Helium have blazed the golden gigging trail between Boston and NYC more times that they can remember, carved a distinctly glorious niche in local pop history with their "American Jean" debut, and become a virtual fixture in most every A&R rolodex in the country. Matador are poised to release a seven-track EP in january, Pirate Prude, and Helium are bragging that it's the longest EP ever made. "We can never seem to keep songs short," confesses Dunton. "We recorded 'Hole in the Ground' and we thought, 'Oh, four minutes, four-and-a-half tops'. It turned out to be nearly nine, and the engineer was going nuts-'You'll never fit that ona single!' With the EP, though, we've really been able to stretch out." Seven times nearly nine-people release albuns shorter than that! "Precisely" But the songs don't seem that long, and they certainly don't seem over-long, Timony, as the band's main songwritter, plants Helium's influences in a collision between her own first loves-hardcore (which she plays) and folk (which she writes). And those are the extremes which show. "I want to somehow do something to improve the satus of being a woman. Right now, I'm trying to figure out how to do that, and if the songs have an under-lying theme, that's it." ("Hole in the) Ground", Helium's most recent single, was written after one of Timony's girlfriends was murdered by an abusive boyfriend. "The song is about her, and the other women who are suffering abouse at the hands of another. But on a larger level, it's an empowerment song, it's about speaking out, getting bigger." Which is a theme both sexes can comprehend. Right now, it's Helium themselves who are getting bigger. After Pirate Prude, there's a debut album to make, and after that, a country-wide tour. "But we're not in any hurry" insists Timony. "Whatever we do, we want to make sure we do it right." "And if it's too long to fit on a single," adds Duntos cryptically, "they'll just have to start making bigger singles." --Dave Thompson original scans credits |
