Mountains Review from Puncture #46

I can't be the only person who finds Mary Timony vaguely unsettling. Here's a musician who somehow looks and sounds both younger (as in jailbait) and older (as in ancient soul) than she is: innocent and evil, naive and world-weary.

And she evokes this multifaceted nature without expending half the energy many of her better-hyped contemporaries do just trying to make themselves one-dimensionally plausible.

When she entered the realm of rock mysticism with the third Helium album, The Magic City, Timony shrouded herself in a fog that induced even more ap-prehension. The most quoted line from that work ("| wanna make love to a uni-corn) used six simple words to connect girlish day-glo fantasies and the more vulgar, basic paintings of the adult imagination. The unicorn trotted down a city street, emblem of magic in the real world. It is this world that Timony creates and inhabits on Mountains.

In many ways, it's a less expansive world than that visited in The Magic City. The latter might have been musical readings from Tolkien et al., but Mountains rather suggests passages from Ti-mony's private thoughts- like observations in a journal. On that level, it beckons with more intimacy than Helium, but musically it tends toward austerity, and other times toward medieval folk music in which a multitude of filigrees swirl about a fixed center.

Timony reinforces this Middle Ages motif with instruments like harpsichord and viola, and draws it out further through song titles like "Dungeon Dance." (Although cheap drum-ma-chine beats supply the foundations for a few tracks, Timony's simple electric guitar playing provides the primary, if not the only, modernist touch.) The tunes are generally content to follow the call of her voice (and the airy, naturalistic production), like pilgrims scuffing down the path to a deserted cathedral.

If the eerie allure of Timony's voice separates Helium from scores of other inexpensively ambitious indie-rock bands, here it unquestionably occupies the spotlight. Embodying a range of contradictions coldly sensuous, excitedly iad-ed, and so on- the voice overcomes its leanings toward flatness with assured, stately moments. Characteristically, she exhales lines -"A demon lured me to his bed" like a woman who has seen and done it all before, yet can't quite hide how much she'd like to see and do it all again. No matter that (as in the darkness of "Poison Moon" or "1542") a sense of foreboding inhibits her pleasure: strange creatures defy normal consequences.

Timony's purgatorial vocal power can't always quite carry Mountains, though. She's never come across as a weak artist, but she's always seemed slightly detached from the performance aspect of her art, on record or onstage.

Within a band, others could fill in the gaps she leaves. On her own, or at least putting her name alone on the spine of an album, those gaps have widened, and for now she stands at a hesitating distance from those who would immerse themselves in her vivid tableaus.

-Jon M. Gilbertson