Mary Timony always sounds like she’s in control. Even at its most exuberant—the zoned-out trills and slanted poetry of Helium’s The Magic City, the hot-rod anthems of Ex Hex—her music exudes a calm, impenetrable confidence. She delivers her vocal melodies in a conversational register, holding her highest highs and lowest lows in reserve. As a guitarist, her riffs and solos tend to turn and bend with a bemused smirk; she plays like she wants you to know she’s holding her power back. “In her songs, sadness and alienation were not embodied, they were subterranean, they were alien, transferred and transformed,” Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein once wrote.
On Untame the Tiger, Timony’s first true solo album in 19 years, sadness and alienation are present on the surface. They’re clearly legible. They’re intensely human. Timony wrote Untame the Tiger following the end of her long-term relationship, while she was caring for her elderly parents. Her father died near the beginning of recording; her mother passed near the end. The searing light of grief sometimes brings with it a fresh emotional clarity, and whether related or not, the songs here are disarmingly straightforward. “A brand-new day, it still hurts like hell,” she sings on the very first song. “What did I get for loving you?” she asks near the album’s end. You can see her eyes narrow as she mutters the answer: “Nothing but pain.”
Still, it doesn’t feel right to call Untame the Tiger a sad record. She’s made those before: Her first two solo albums, 2000’s Mountains and 2002’s The Golden Dove, couch their melancholy in fantastical imagery and occasionally dress it up in antique instrumentation. They’re also, according to Timony, “miserable records about being depressed.” That may be a bit unfair, but Untame the Tiger shows that she’s determined to avoid ever making depressing music again. Even as it confronts sadness, the album is spritely, frequently bright, as intensely melodic as Ex Hex’s triumphant Rips and more playful than a record this heartbroken probably should be. Most people run a drum kit through a flanger because it sounds badass when you’re blasting cigs with the boys, not because they’re suddenly alone in their search for fulfillment.
On Untame the Tiger, Timony draws ideas and sounds from throughout her career together: the twang and drone of odd tunings and unusual instruments mingle with fuzzed-out solos and starry-eyed pop songs like mismatched old friends doing their best to be supportive. It gives the album a looseness and curiosity that, combined with the swagger of her guitar-playing, makes even the bleakest moments feel open and warm. The clarity of opener “No Thirds”’ melody, and the obvious pleasure with which she rips her lead, give it a sense of purpose, the way having a big cry can leave you feeling more grounded—still aching, but exhaling, too. “Now I wanna feel what I’ve never never felt before,” she sings. Like sunbeams through an overcast sky, her inherent melodicism can’t help but punch its way through.
Timony seems to know this, so she tries out different ways of embodying her loneliness to compensate. In “The Guest,” it becomes human and stands at her threshold; “Am I driven to emptiness or does it just come to me?” she wonders. Elsewhere, she plainly tells a partner that their declaration of eternal love is “a lie.” She guides her band, including Fairport Convention drummer Dave Mattacks, through the pastoral desert blues of “Looking for the Sun,” but when the song seems to call for a triumphant solo, she slips back into the atmosphere, helping the group frame the now-empty space. It makes it sound as though she’s left the stage entirely.
More frequently, Timony’s brand of mourning is bound up with levity, as if she can’t consider the fullness of her pain without being conscious of its absurdity. It’s all right there in “Dominoes,” a song Timony has said is about how even the transgressive pleasure of dating someone you know isn’t right for you can lead to heartbreak. As she’s “trying to steal back my affection,” amazed at her new solitude, she’s surrounded by girl-group harmonies, blown-out acoustic guitars, fills from a department-store electronic drum kit—it’s an entire ELO production. As she does so often on Untame the Tiger, Timony exercises her strongest maximal-pop sensibilities in a song about feeling abandoned and alone. It’s fun. It’s funny. It feels like a joke at the expense of the song’s unnamed lover: You thought you’d get the upper hand on someone who can conjure up all of this?
