Helium's Highly Accomplished

HELIUM Pirate Prude EP/CD (Matador)

Helium is a Cambridge-based band; its nucleus is singer/guitarist Mary Timony (who used to be in Autoclave with Christina Billotte of Slant 6), and their every-three-weeks-or-so-for-two-years schedule of gigs has built them a startlingly big live following. It's "normal," or used to be normal, for new bands to write "difficult" songs and to gradually drop them in favor of poppier, clearer numbers.

The reverse happened with Helium: as more and more people showed up to their gigs, the songs got longer and slower. A bouncy college-radio favorite, "American Jean," vanished from their live set, and was replaced by complicated works in which the incidental sound of Mary Timony's fingers sliding along the guitar neck, or the slow boom of mallets on drums, might be as important to a song as the sequence of chords and riffs, On a good night, the effect was cathartic, hypnotic; on a bad night (which mostly meant a night with a bad sound engineer), the new songs sounded sludgy, draggy or muffled.

The "new Helium sound" came from some combination of the bands Sebadoh and come (I'm guessing), from hanging out with other guitarists and engineers, and from the previously-unlooked-for depths of somebody's soul. And it translates on record into the most moving emotional document you'll hear in any popmusic this year. Aautoclave songs didn't really have subjects--the lyrics were often excuses for wordplay, or repeated single phrases. (Slant 6 lyrics are still like that.)

In Helium the subject dominates the lyrics: that subject is the commodification of sex, the squeezing-out of whatever intimacy might have once been possible between boys and girls, and its apparent replacement by a frightening network of mutual but very unequal dependence and exchange. The title phrase "Pirate Prude" appears in two songs. It turns out, I think, to mean that the body as an object with use-value (to be sold, or taken, by a "pirate" boyfriend; to be "pirated," appropriated for gain, by the body's owner) and the body as a source of fear (to a "prude") are intimately related, and that neither point of view can be got rid of. Maybe the "pirate" and the "prude" are the only options we have--maybe you either run from yourself, or "self" yourself, and what would you do about love and sex if that turned out to be true? Pirate Prude is a pop record--a genuine pop record; you can hum everything on it without half trying--to which sophisticated theory-talk, about commodification and artifice and femininity and poetics, wouldn't seem at all an inappropriate reaction. Nor would tears.

There are only six songs on Pirate Prude, arranged into two groups of three (on the vinyl version, that means side one and side two): song one is a long, gradually building, apprehensive work; song two is short, light, vocal-oriented, and witty; song three is the emotional punchline, with a memorable chorus and a slow riff to match. The first song on side two, called "ooo," includes both the sounds of hesitant fingers on a guitar neck and a periodic irruption of jazzy trumpet-playing, as if to dramatize some kind of contest between cool, sleek exterior (trumpets) and internal fear or hesitancy (guitar neck sound). These are exactly the kinds of devices that require the songs to be so slow (otherwise we wouldn't notice them), and it's no wonder they were hard to understand live: this kind of songwriting virtually requires a studio engineer who knows what the band is doing. This makes the Helium EP one of the only records in years to actually benefit from sophisticated multiple-track recording.

It's appropriate, then, that the third songs on both sides are startling wake-up calls. "XXX" scarily suggests that maybe prostitution and normal romance aren't so far apart after all: "I feel like candy/I'll go out on the street and make some money/That was just a joke/About the money:/You're going to pay me with your life." That's the chorus: it comes around at least three times, and by the third time the "joke" has become a real threat. It's not a threat of literal violence at all, but the threat that the girl who is singing is already romantically enmeshed in a compromising situation with the boy she's addressing. It's a scary prospect, and one the song paints not in any simplistic terms of rage (cf. Bikini Kill--who are a good band, but not this good), but with genuine ear.

Which doesn't mean that these songs cast their singer as a victim, either: they're less ferocious than fearful, but they're less fearful than poised. Timony's singing, mostly in a very high register, suggests that she's just maintaining enough composure to control where the songs go (and, for the song's sparely-drawn characters, where their/her lives/life will go). And, more than anything, these songs are well-and attentively built: there's no raw punk attack. Instead the emotional depth comes from the care that each sound, each note, has obviously received. The long, long melodies on some songs (as opposed to a three-note punk riff) are further evidence of how much attention has been paid to every bit of this record, and of how much attention you will likely find yourself paying to it. The last song, "Love $ $ $"--my favorite in their current live set, where it's called "Babyface"--has retained all the staticky "--has retained all the staticky guitar rawness it requires, while preserving (the engineer deserves a medal) the clarity of every serious, fragile syllable. Helium can be oblique and witty, but here the directness is what shocks, from the boyfriend-girlfriend indictments of the verses ("He'll pay for anything, you're his money") to the anything, you're his money") to the chorus, which describes the self-image of just about everyone I know: "It's been a long time since you saw your body/ It looks like someone, yeah, it looks like somebody/ It's not beautiful, it's not ugly/ It's just your body and it looks like somebody else..." It takes an awful lot of songwriting craft to fit that awful, simple truth into a rock and roll song, to balance the fragility it evokes with the anger it ought to evoke. That Helium makes it work is, quietly, a revolutionary accomplishment.