Well, I failed miserably to complete the 365 new albums in the course of one year. But, I have been listening to a lot of new music still. It just was a little too ambitious for a flake like me to stick to the schedule and writing up something every day. I'll put together a list shortly of things that I have listened to in the last couple months and enjoyed. Also, I didn't want to completely stop writing about music. But, I don't want to tie it all to a single theme, that I am going to probably change my mind about down the road, like the previous attempt this year. So, I'll probably just write about things as I get the motivation to write about things.
Which brings me to today. It came to my attention that a couple days ago, Helmet's Betty became twenty years old. I have an odd relationship with this album, and I guess to a larger extent, this band. I started getting back into heavy music at the beginning of the 90's and Helmet was one of the bands that was able to hit both sides of a lot of fences. They had some popularity, but were still a pretty unknown band to the world as a whole. They were heavy, but had melody. They could appeal to metal heads, hardcore kids, punks, the college rock crowd, experimental music fans, and in a more influential role, the newly forming, shudder inducing nu metal genre. I got my first taste when I was listening to a tape a friend had made that had the song Sinatra, off the first LP, on it. I didn't quite get them yet at this point, but at least the band's name was on my radar. I then heard the name again, on Headbanger's Ball a year, or two, later and the opening bass line of Unsung, off of the second LP Meantime came in and even before the intro finished and the riffs hit, I was hooked. I could not tell you how many times I have listened to my copy of Meantime, it hit me at easily the best time of my life for music. Meantime is the reason I first heard about this band still listen to them over 20 years later, but Meantime is not the best album that Helmet put out. It may remain my favorite to this day, for nostalgia or for the amount of times I have smashed the song You Borrowed into my brain, but what they did next is pretty close to perfect in my eyes, although it wasn't an immediate realization.
Which then brings me to 1994 and 16 year old me got his hands on the first taste of what would come from this album from the Crow soundtrack with the song Milktoast, an alternate version of the song Milquetoast that would come out on Betty a few months later. The song was heavy enough, and seemed to fit into the mold of what I expected the new album to sound like. That summer, one of the last truly carefree summers of my youth.....the summer between junior and senior year of high school, I picked up the new album, Upon my first listen, as the opening track Wilma's Rainbow started playing, all was right, this was exactly what Helmet was about. It had that stompy feel, it had fuzzy guitars, it had strong vocals all on a song that could easily have been found on the album I had worn out over the last 2 years. The next song begins, starts off mellow, but once it kicks in, it's just straight heaviness with shouted, brutal vocals. Then comes Biscuits For Smut, and things got a little sour. It's a weird song, which at 16 I couldn't handle, but now the song flows just fine. Things were fine again for the next couple songs and the Rollo, which is another song with weird vocals. These songs, again to 16 year old me, really broke up the flow of the album, and I was still soured while listening to songs that are arguably some of my favorite songs on the album, which come right after them. Then after a couple more songs, they throw in the song Beautiful Love, a cover of an old Waltz standard. After a fairly straight forward intro, the song gets the abrasive, noisy treatment. The Silver Hawaiian, which comes in two songs later is another of the weird songs and then ending with Sam Hell, a slower banjo fueled blues song.
Over the course of the last twenty years, as I have indicated, I have grown to not have any issues with the weird songs that break up the album, and even enjoy them. They don't so much stop the flow of the album, as I once thought, but instead offer a breather between the heaviness of the other songs on the album. I have been using the term weird for some of these songs, but that is just how I used to think about them when I was younger. I have come to appreciate things that aren't as straight forward over the years, which has helped to progress my thoughts on this album as a whole, and I probably shouldn't think about them so much as weird as trying out different things. Songs like I Know and Milquetoast, which bookend Biscuits for Smut, would both be placed in my top 5 Helmet songs and maybe now I might think they benefit from having the song in between. The feedback noise ending to Beautiful Love transitions perfectly into the beginning of the fantastic Speechless. There are less shouted vocals on this album than in the past, but that isn't a bad thing because on the songs that utilize the more abrasive vocals, they stand out even more, like on TIC and the ending of Street Crab. There isn't a song on this album that I don't appreciate to this day and could listen to over the course of a full album or even individually. Relistening to this album almost makes me forgot about the fact that they reunited in 2006 and are now putting out garbage.
Finally, this is not so much a review as it is just my thoughts about this almost completely perfect album that hit an age where I felt it need to be talked about. This is also about the different ways I viewed this record at the age of sixteen as I did at thirty-six. In fact, if I had written about this album every year for the last twenty, you would probably see an increase almost yearly of how much I talk about the positives of the record and take away the negatives. Because, as it (I) keeps getting older, it just keeps getting better and better.
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