Some bands have a gift for painting exquisite images and drawing listeners in to feel the music in their guts. They draw together incisive lyrical content that pays special attention to detail with complimentary textural sounds that flesh out and bolster the subjects broached and thus present vivid, fully formed and marvelously articulated pictures. Helms Alee is such a band but, unlike others including Pavement, The Notwist or even Smashing Pumpkins, Helms Alee makes no attempt to enrich their music with tonal color; rather, on Night Terror, they exact fierce and violent illustrations by simply contrasting light and darkness.
The band sets up their ‘light versus dark’ dynamic in the opening bludgeon of “Left Handy Man Handle” without the benefit of a prelude to inform listeners of what they’re going to do; with no words, the track thrusts a mortifying collage of caustic, overdriven guitar riffs, surf tremolo and marshal drumming squarely into the collective face of listeners and kicks them through it until, with heads left spinning, the band and singer Ben Verellen (also of These Arms Are Snakes) smash the incapacitated over the head with clockwork cymbals, a throbbing bass pulse, fetid and sludgy guitars and a desperate howl in the opening minutes of “A New Roll.”
One would think that would be enough to set the tone for any one record, but before “A New Roll” even ends, Helms Alee turns on itself with a cathartic instrumental hum that instantly soothes those nerves left frayed by the initial beating and Dana James steps in to console listeners still mistrustful of the band’s initial assault.
Now you’ve got the basis for Night Terror – an entire record designed upon the concept of the “Sometimes to realize you were well, someone must come along and hurt you” dichotomy and accompanying foil.
Throughout tracks including “A Weirding Away,” “Rogue’s Yarn,” “Big Spider” and “Paraphrase,” Helms Alee takes great pains to segregate instrumental passages into loud, caustic and aggressive blasts in the vein of Big Black (the production of Night Terror mimics a small room, Steve Albini recording too) against James’ vocal parts (where the band also shifts on a dime to get impossibly sweet and bracing sounds as well) that often mimic nourish pop like The Pixies or Silversun Pickups but with more a more sizable and significant chip on its shoulder.
As the record progresses, the tracks begin to exhibit a more maniacal and ecstatic swirl (depending upon who’s manning the mic at that particular moment) – particularly in “Grandfather Claws” and “Shmnna” that is an unmistakable build to some sort of climax, but again the band surprises listeners by not falling apart in “Wild Notes” and actually calming down to give an eerie impression of perfect sanity and even remorse in the minor key piano that drives the track.
For a band that has reveled in conflict and gone out of its way to present two very different styles mixed together on a track-by-track basis, “Wild Notes” offers a kind of resolution that, paradoxically, leaves audiences wondering what will come next from Helms Alee. Because the contrast between the vocal presence and instrumental deliveries is so strong in these songs, allowing one singer the opportunity to dominate would dramatically alter the compelling framework and balance that the band has developed on Night Terror. The fans that the band wins with this record can only hope that this style of attack becomes a recurring dream.
Band:
Helms Alee myspace
Label:
Hydra Head Records web site
