Plant a Seed There to Remember You: The Importance of Helium’s Dirt of Luck

90’s alt-rock was ruled by riot grrrls. Though the genre spearheads Bikini Kill, Sleater Kinney and Bratmobile reigned in Washington state, retaliating against the male dominated grunge scene, the voice of the angry girl was everywhere. Liz Phair was in Chicago singing about explicit sex and poking fun at the the male rock hero on demoed mixtapes passed around to friends, appearing on soundtracks to indie documentaries about third wave feminism, and quickly signing into indie rock stardom. The attitudes, politics, and stories of these punks and indie-rockers seeped into the mainstream: Alanis Morissette had hit singles blasting from every radio, crooning about giving blowjobs in movie theaters; Fiona Apple was preaching that the world was bullshit at award ceremonies; Tori Amos was singing a haunting retelling of her rape a cappella, and becoming the first spokesperson for the sexual assault hotline RAINN.

Among those inspired by the riot grrrl movement was Mary Timony of Boston based alt-rock band Helium. While lesser known to some, Timony is marveled by punk legends like Ian MacKaye, and an inspiration to the sound of Boston hailing bands of today like Speedy Ortiz and Pile. Helium’s provocative, dirty music reflects the feminist narratives that were the foundation of riot grrrl and riot grrrl adjacent music, with craftful songwriting and an iconic 90s sound. Their debut album The Dirt of Luck is an essential rock album that deserves as much recognition and memoriam as the other greats of 90s alternative, from Nevermind to Loveless.

The dirtiness and punk-inspired sound of Helium comes from Timony’s roots in Washington, D.C. As a teenager, she studied jazz guitar and viola at Duke Ellington School of the Arts by day, and went to sweaty local punk shows at night. Her teachers described her as a prodigal guitar genius: “You can’t teach what she has.” She played in the band Autoclave out of high school, and after relocating to Boston for college, she formed Helium in the summer of 1992. Acting as songwriter, vocalist and guitarist, she joined forces with bassist Ash Bowie (of Polvo) and drummer Shawn King Devlin. The band quickly found themselves joining the legendary Matador Records lineup of bands like Pavement, Liz Phair, Guided by Voices, and Yo La Tengo. The label released Helium’s first full length album, The Dirt of Luck.

The Dirt of Luck’s sound is extreme. Meticulously messy, Helium has everything for the punk, the grunger, the shoegazer, the indie rocker, and even the folkie: “I think the time may come very very soon when Helium records sound like Joni Mitchell...I would say that I have tried to make our songs sound like folk songs, and I mean like the songs you sang at camp more than anything” Timony said. The mixing and production for the album was inspired by Dr. Dre’s work on Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle, as well as music from the soundtracks of Sega Genesis games like Sonic the Hedgehog that the band played during their breaks from tracking: extreme highs and lows; muddy and flat, but also trebly and screeching. Timony’s vocals are deep and dark; they’re always low in the mix, but her words are enunciated. She’s often described as monotone but wrongfully, because melodic earworms dance right below the crunchy guitars that are tastefully overpowering. It’s a classic example of hi-fi does lo-fi production, true to the sound of a four-track tape recorder but on higher end gear. The songs Timony writes are reminiscent of medieval compositions with her combined use of the mixolydian scale, harpsichord synth sounds, and low frequencies that feel like a Gregorian chant. They’re carnival-like with perpetually happy major chord changes that begin to feel creepy, more like the seedy underbelly of the carnival Kathleen Hanna describes. 

The album’s opener and lead single, “Pat’s Trick” made its way onto MTV to be critiqued by Beavis and Butthead. This first track gets all the hype, but to stop your listen there would be to miss out on Timony’s narrative critique of gender roles. There’s lots of femininity in the muck of Helium’s sound. Timony weaves caricatures of female stereotypes through the lyrics of her mid-tempo masterpiece. “Baby’s Going Underground” is a shoegaze dream with sweet sullen singing of a masochistic prostitute, accompanied by childlike xylophone twinklings and droning guitars: “baby likes it when it hurts like that / a million days after the fact.” An angel is the centerfold on the whispery track “Medusa,” the song whose namesake is a mythological woman-as-monster that turns men to stone. “Superball” is lit up with a poppy chorus that challenges the stereotype of female fragility and anger by owning it and daring someone to push her buttons: “I’m small like a superball / throw me at the wall / I’m fragile like an egg shell / I’m mad as hell.” Gut wrencher “Honeycomb” features melancholy slide guitar that’s like self harm to listen to. It tells the tale of unrequited love from a girl who’s “sweeter than a honeycomb,” but who’ll “eat you up” and “spit out the burrs.” The whore, the monster, the madwoman and the temptress: these aren’t tropes Timony is seeing in others, but in herself: “the lyrics are like a satire in that they are pointing out that I don’t like these certain female stereotypes, but I think that rather than making fun of someone else like a cartoon typically does, I am making fun of myself...like...‘look, THIS is what you have made me into...underneath the quiet, girly, exterior lurks the monster of destruction’ whatever...” In satirizing these female archetypes, Timony is showing the results of confining someone to a one dimensional role. When women are reduced to archetypes, they lose their humanity. Their lack of humanity allows their abilities to be stifled, and for their bodies to be exploited for male pleasure. This exploitation leads to the self-disgust Timony describes; feeling dirty is a motif throughout the album, described in “Pat’s Trick,” “Trixie’s Star,” “Baby’s,” “All the X’s Have Wings” and “Honeycomb.” With the amount of complete disregard for boundaries and lack of respect women experience, the only viable option is to explode with rage in the form of screeching guitars, and create a lyrical world of your own. 

Timony offers young women a narrative of frustration to identify with in The Dirt of Luck. The album is such a cohesive record, meant to be listened to from start to finish. There’s something orchestral about it, and not only because of its pre-twentieth century influenced sounds: it’s like a requiem for the female stereotypes that have confined how men and women alike think of women’s abilities. In a 1997 interview, Timony said, “I’m sick personally of all this medieval bickering about what girls can and can’t do. What is necessary is to prove wrong the people who believe, and the forces inside us that say girls are stunted beings in some way. PLEASE!!!!!!” She paved a way for women to pick up a guitar and express their anger at misogyny in a healthy way, and shared a narrative we see in so much music from women in the 90s. 

Helium disbanded in 1998, but Timony has continued making music for three decades. She embarked on a solo career in which she continued to write about gendered struggles (her first solo album Mountains just celebrated its twentieth anniversary last year). She even put out a couple of E.P.s with Carrie Brownstein (Sleater Kinney and Portlandia) in their minimalist side project The Spells. She went on to perform in bands Wild Flag, and more recently Ex Hex. Though she’s off the grid and out of the spotlight, Mary Timony’s off-kilter music will be influential for many years to come.

Images via Matador Records, Thumbnail photography by James Smolka