To put it succinctly, Mary Timony hooking up with drummer Devin Ocampo has given her music a beneficial kick in the ass, if only because she's never worked with a drummer that would kick it. While Helium's music grew in leaps and bounds between Timony's early chunky chugging and the more-pronounced medieval flourishes on the group's last album, it's safe to say Shawn Devlin's methodical drumming wasn't setting any BPM records. Going it alone the first two times, Timony was more likely to use a clavinet, harpsichord, or drum machine than an honest-to-goodness drumkit (which was a shame for Christina Files, the sporadically-used drummer on those two albums). In contrast, 2005's Ex Hex, Timony's first collaboration with Ocampo, featured a rock-like substance Helium fans knew and loved, but with an added boost of nitrous. His fluid polyrhythmic flourishes meshed nicely with Timony's newfound guitar heroism-- see, all that Ren-Faire noodling you whiners bitched about did some good for her after all!-- and the album itself turned out to be a pleasant synthesis of Timony's career-to-date.
This time around, Timony and Ocampo are joined by Ocampo's Medications bandmate Chad Molter on bass, and are rightfully calling themselves The Mary Timony Band-- Timony's still the one driving the car, of course, but the other two are paying for their fair share of gasoline. It's their gentle pitter-patter that keeps "Pink Clouds'" talk about pink clouds from evaporating, and they're definitely no slouch when it comes to rocking out ("Curious Minds" and the appropriately titled "Rockman" be proof). On one track-- "Pause / Off"-- the trio even manages to pull off a fair impersonation of Sleater-Kinney, with Timony vocally channeling her former Spells cohort Carrie Brownstein as she laconically zings lamestains "hanging out in the CVS parking lot" and "Supreme Court misters" trying to mess around "with me and my sisters."
Refreshing lyrical moments like those noted above are few and far between, unfortunately. The woman whose incisive words once cross-pollinated grrlish gender politics with alluring imagery ripped straight out of Kristin Hersh's songbook is now alternating hippie-dippy musings on nature's endless bounty (clouds, trees, bunnies, etc.) with lazy go-nowhere couplets like "We can't go back/ It's a natural fact." Timony tries to shoot off more one-liners in the semi-topical spirit of "Pause / Off," but they don't work as well-- "Ted Nugent, hey, what you gonna do?/ What you gonna do when they come for you?/ White tails gonna hunt you down/ Do unto you as they've been done." But whatever lack of effort seems evident in the words, the music more than makes up for it. Just before the WTF Nuge shout-out in "Sharpshooter," there's a rip-roaring bridge that displays the band's ample strengths. It's not the only example-- "Rockman" eventually lives up to its name when Timony stops going on about the dude the song's supposedly about, and the winsome waltz in "Window" (decorated with pretty strings and piano twinklings) works best when Timony's voice gets subsumed by the song's gentle melody. It's a shame she's doesn't seem to be saying much of anything nowadays, but as long as she has music this strong doing the talking for her, Mary Timony will do just fine.
