SOLID: Timony (here with Devin Ocampo and Chad Molter) continues her path from Helium’s noisy punk to more expansive progressive rock. |
In “Sharpshooter,” one of the catchier and more triumphant numbers former Helium frontwoman Mary Timony has written, she goes after the rock world’s most famous bow-and-arrow hunter, the Nuge. The song kicks off The Shapes We Make, her first for the Kill Rock Stars label. “Ted Nugent/What you gunna do?” she purrs. “What you gunna do when they come for you?/Whitetails gunna hunt you down/Do unto you as they’ve been done to.”
Over the phone from Washington D.C. — the home town she returned to after making a name for herself in Boston — Timony calls the song “a little jab at Ted Nugent for fun.” Then she adds, “I got really obsessed with how much I hated Ted Nugent. I had this image of all the animals he shoots coming back and shooting him.”
Bloodcurdling songs of vengeance aren’t new to Timony. With Helium back in the mid ’90s, she married some vicious lyrics to shredding, distorted guitar licks. Helium were a noisy, jarring band, and Timony was a sexy, spooky, even psychotic-sounding siren. As she said in 1994, “Yes, I’m sullen and withdrawn, and I take out my anger.”
Now she’s in an up mood, and she laughs frequently. The new CD is also playful. It follows a path that the now 37-year-old Timony has been on for a decade or so, first with Helium and then as a solo artist, from post-punk abrasion to more expansive progressive rock.
Helium called it quits in 1998, after bassist (and Timony’s ex-boyfriend) Ash Bowie decided to leave for California. Her first solo CD, Mountains (Matador), was out by 2000. The Shapes We Make, her fourth post-Helium disc, is credited to the M. Timony Band, whose line-up is completed by bassist Chad Molter and drummer Devin Ocampo. Ocampo also produced the disc, and he’s Timony’s latest former boyfriend/bandmate. (They continue to work together, but Joe Wong will be filling the drummer’s chair on the band’s spring tour, which arrives at the Middle East upstairs on June 13.)
Looking back, Timony says that Helium “ran its course. We’d done a lot together, and logistically it made sense to go solo. It was a natural thing.” She does admit that she “didn’t really realize how good Helium had it at the time. I didn’t realize it was going to be a lot harder to do my own thing.”
She’s always been adept at switching gears, and The Shapes We Make is no exception. Airy passages give way to intense guitar bursts; darkness and light mix and mingle; keys change unexpectedly but fluidly. It’s both challenging and engaging. “My biggest thing was, I think, that I let go of trying to force the music. I had more fun on this record with the songwriting. It’s more collaborative, especially the songs that are more jammy — they’re arranged as a band, and there’s more emphasis on playing really tight.”
