Timony feels pumped about Helium revival
If you need proof that the Boston band Helium was two decades ahead of its time, consider this: All of the band’s music — two albums, two EPs and a bunch of stray tracks — just received the deluxe reissue treatment from Matador, on the 20th anniversary of the band’s breakup.
Frontwoman Mary Timony, lately known for the bands Ex Hex and Wild Flag, is now doing a Helium-themed tour that hits the Sinclair tomorrow, playing to bigger crowds than the band did before.
“Revisiting this stuff isn’t as strange as I thought it would be,” Timony said from her tour van earlier this week. “It feels like I’m playing covers of songs that I know pretty well. But if we’d done this tour 10 years ago, nobody would have come. The music is too weird for some people, and I can understand that.”
Because most of the other Helium members weren’t available, she’s doing the tour with a new band, mainly drawn from the New York group Hospitality. But she expects that drummer Shawn Devlin, the only other member who was in every Helium lineup, will sit in at the Sinclair.
Helium was always a hard band to pin down. Initially, they were a snarling guitar trio, with Timony lyrically inhabiting various characters — pirates, witches, prostitutes — to make her feminist point.
“I was an angry 24-yearold, that’s for sure. All those characters were different parts of me, and I was using a lot of symbolism. I was always being asked about myself as a woman playing music, and I was getting really sick of that. But when I think back on those songs, I don’t really think of lyrics. To me, the struggle and the fun part were both all musical. I’d think of a song as done before it even had words. When we got to the ‘No Guitars’ EP (early in 1997), we’d become pretty reclusive — those were all songs that I wrote in my bedroom, and to me, it sounds that way.”
By the time of “The Magic City” (later in 1997), Helium had moved into a fantasy-inspired realm of progressive and psychedelic rock. Timony credits some of that movement to bassist/keyboardist Ash Bowie, who’d recently joined the band.
“I tended to stick with simple pop chords, but he really was a genius. If you listen to a song like ‘Baby’s Going Underground,’ he’s playing this low minor second all the way through, which is really dissonant. Either you think it’s a horrible noise or you totally get it. We were listening to a ton of music at the time, a lot of psychedelic stuff. Our goal was always to not sound like anything else. If a song sounded like something we’d done before, we would throw it away.”
Timony is lately making more exuberant rock with her regular band Ex Hex, and she’ll be getting back to that after the Helium tour.
“We’ve got five songs so far, and they’ll be a record in the fall. The way we work as a band is to just get together and knock it out.” “Mary Timony Plays Helium,” with Noveller, at the Sinclair, 52 Church St., Cambridge, tomorrow. Tickets: $18-$20; sinclaircambridge.com.