The Dirt of Luck (1995), Helium
The butterfly is a symbol of change – of transformation; from caterpillar, to cocoon, and finally to butterfly.
Metamorphosis, it can mean whatever you want it to mean; a new job at K-Mart, shaving your head, getting a tattoo without mom’s consent, breaking up with your “true love” that you only met three weeks ago, being grounded “for life” because dad found a bag of pot hidden underneath your dresser, or: things a high school kid in 1995 would be doing between episodes of The X-Files and listening to noisy alternative rock on a portable Magnavox Discman that takes eight double-A batteries and comes complete with DBB – Dynamic Bass Boost – and digital servo processing and incessant skipping at even the slightest movement. That kid may be listening to No Doubt’s “Tragic Kingdom” or The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” or even Beck’s “Mellow Gold,” but they would be missing out if they weren’t listening to Helium’s new record: “The Dirt of Luck.”
For Washington D.C. local Mary Timony, metamorphosis meant channeling the leftover angst and “fuck you” energy from her own transformative teenage years into walls of sound. Timony received classical training at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts and had already established herself in the underground noise rock scene with her previous band Autoclave, known for their technical guitar noodling rather than cohesive song structures. Timony would go on to channel this technical noodling into noisy pop rock after moving to Boston and joining the band Helium as their lead singer and guitarist. The journey to cult status began with the release of the EP “Pirate Prude” in 1994, followed by the critically acclaimed LP “The Dirt of Luck” in 1995.
If Autoclave was the cocoon, then Helium was the butterfly that emerged from that cocoon. And this butterfly wore all black, Doc Martens, and a serious chip on her shoulder.
Many of the songs on “The Dirt of Luck” are coming-of-age stories for the modern girl in suburban America, filled with angst, lost loves, obsessions, and anger toward archaic gender roles and the expectations they thrust upon women; these songs are brimming with lyrical flourishes fit for horror films and monster movies. Mary Timony and Helium would have fit perfectly alongside The Breeders or Shy on stage at The Bronze – the nightclub in Buffy the Vampire Slayer – except Timony’s lyrics possess a poetic verve that outshines her ’90s peers. It would be easy to say that Mary Timony sounds like another ’90s female singer, but these comparisons are often vacuous and the prominence of these comparisons in rock journalism is suspicious, especially when the same type of comparison is rarely done for male rock singers. In the ’90s, and sometimes even now, women in rock bands are seen as a novelty with only a few different archetypes used to describe them. “On Pop Music,” however, prefers to hold itself to a higher standard by describing what singers actually sound like, to varying degrees of success: and Mary Timony sounds like Mary Timony – nothing more, nothing less. Timony’s singing is like a sardonic pout whispered in the dark corner of a dive bar occupied solely by vampires; a rage bubbles underneath her airy vocals, and she expresses this anger through walls of harsh guitar noise – and the song “Superball” perfectly showcases this.
“Superball” is the metamorphosis – it opens with a dirty vortex of sound, a ritualistic drum beat accompanied by a screwdriver being dragged across guitar strings but suddenly the cocoon bursts with a build-up of Sonic the Hedgehog synths, and the butterfly emerges in a discordant flurry of guitar tones that drift somewhere between aimless chugging and revving a chainsaw while wearing a pink bunny suit. It’s brutal and cute and unexpected and demands your attention. Mary sings in pout and petulance: “I’m small, like a superball. Throw me at the wall. I’m fragile, like an eggshell. I’m mad as hell.” And you feel it. We are small and fragile, and although this heinous world throws us at the wall, we are resilient like a superball, and we bounce back mad as hell. Verily, we are a bundle of contradictions, and this resonates within us, bounces around inside our brains, and compels humming for weeks. And this all happens within two minutes and thirty-five seconds on a song that sounds like it was recorded in fellow Matador Records alumni Robert Pollard’s basement – in the best possible way.
“Whenever Helium took a break from working on the record down in Philly, we played Sonic the Hedgehog. We got super into the video game music on Sonic the Hedgehog (and Road Rash, too, I think). It has this really thin and extreme kind of quality that’s cool, so we were making the record, we found ourselves thinking, Okay, how do we get it to sound more like that? We also literally tried to get the record to mimic the actual sound quality of the four-track recordings, which is pretty crappy—just flat- and trebly-sounding.” -Mary Timony. 2017. Talkhouse Interview.
“Superball” is an example of a perfect pop song: catchy, concise, considered. It builds up and pays off. It combines Helium’s best and worst aspects – unexpected hooks and excessive guitar noodling – into an angsty anthem that resonates with even the most stoic of souls, epitomizing Helium’s unique style of musically juxtaposing the yin and yang of ugly-beauty. And the entire album follows suit. “Pat’s Trick” and “Trixie’s Star” ease the listener into these contradictions slowly before jumping headfirst into full-blown metamorphosis with “Baby’s Going Underground,” which caterpillars with feedback like that of an air-raid siren then cocoons into a wall of noise before butterflying into gentle xylophone-tinged ear candy; “Silver Angel” playfully mixes abrasive chugging with ringing synths before putting on the brakes with a sludgy chorus that sounds like it was fed through an old radio. And “Medusa” opens with repetitive chanting that flows into a fluttering chorus that sticks with you for weeks.
Just as Helium has lulled you into yinyang complacency, they shift gears with “Comet #9”; a haunting piano-only number that could serve as the build-up to a jump scare in a monster flick and signals the final leg of the album. From this point, there is a lull in the noise until the depressive slide-guitar ballad of “Honeycomb” kicks in, describing an obsessive girlfriend with a foul mouth that’s “sweeter than a honeycomb” but “slower than a valium,” and one can’t help but wonder if the song is autobiographical in nature as Mary Timony sings with a sullen irony that could only come from personal experience. The song compositionally mirrors valium with its downtempo groove and simple melody plucked lazily over a thick layer of heavy distortion.
To craft an album full of Superballs would be a monumental feat, and while “The Dirt of Luck” comes close – it doesn’t quite reach that level of consistent brilliance. Songs such as “Medusa,” “Honeycomb,” and, of course, “Superball” are untouchable pop rock classics but the inclusion of more subdued, meandering tracks such as “All the X’s Have Wings” and “Oh, The Wind and the Rain” and “Flowers of the Apocalypse” on the second half of the album hurt the pacing and make Helium’s first full-length album a heavily front-loaded experience.
The butterfly is a symbol of change – of transformation; from caterpillar to cocoon and finally to butterfly. Helium’s music captures this metamorphosis within 44 minutes and 23 seconds on one of the most idiosyncratic albums of the ‘90s – even if it’s a bit dirty sometimes.
