Dear Friends,
Yesterday was a weird day.
For most of it, I was pretty calm. There are some things going on in Maine that are a bit scary due to some health concerns, but I feel like Rhondi is in a good place with it and dealing as well as can be. I wish I could be there with her, obviously, but life is what it is.
Had a good jam at Aaron’s and we wrote a couple of cool riffs that might turn into really good songs. Then I lost my mind over a bunch of forks.
Yep, that is correct. Elise made dinner and I was appreciative of that before her friend said, “You are on your own for a fork” or something like that. Somehow almost all of our forks have gone missing.
I don’t understand this at all.
Those forks better show up and soon.
*****
Today will be another day.
*****
As I sit and listen to Meantime, the 1992 record by Helmet, it occurs to me that this record was hugely influential to me. If not for Helmet, I think Hillbilly Devilspeak would have sounded very different. At the time of its release, I was blown away by it.
I had gotten a copy of their first record a year earlier and was becoming a big fan. Then, in August of 1992, Helmet came to the Mason Jar in Phoenix and another band I really liked, Hammerhead, opened the show. Quicksand was also on the bill and their album, Slip, was getting really big at the time.
That show was a game changer for me. Here were these three super heavy bands that didn’t look anything like what I had thought super heavy bands should look like. They did not fit the mold in my mind, and I stood there, sweating with a couple hundred other people on a hot August night (the 9th, to be exact) and had my life changed.
I wanted to do what they did.
This was also the best show I saw Helmet play out of the four or five shows I have seen them do. It’s not that they were really band any of the other times, but they toured with bands (Melvins and Jesus Lizard) that were just better the next few times I saw them. I still loved Helmet, but there was a chink in the armor.
I also felt like the next several records Helmet did were not nearly as interesting or as good as their first two. Meantime is bad ass, and I wanted more of that. Sadly, I didn’t get it.
But I didn’t come to bury Helmet.
“In the Meantime” is one hell of an opener. Helmet has come up with some signature riffs during their career and this is one of them. The crispness of the riff is something that just slips into the old ear and buries itself among the synapses.
In 2003 or 2004, Danny NSK and I helped Soulfly out with some demos and one of the songs we did at Villain Recording was a cover of “Meantime.” We rocked the hell out of that song with Max and Joe. I wish I had a copy of those demos. Would be fun to hear them again.
The interplay between Page Hamilton (guitar/vox) and John Stanier (drums) was really what made early Helmet go. They would completely lock in and, when bolstered by rhythm guitarist Peter Mengede and bassist Henry Bogdan, the quartet became one heavy ass purveyor of jazzy metal with just enough sludge to make a ton of fans on all sides of the metal and alternative world.
Meantime just churns on. “Ironhead” starts off a little weak and then becomes a bulldozer by the end. “Give It” rocks hard and then “Unsung” comes around. “Unsung” is a scorcher.
The best song on the record, “Unsung” is another one of those signature Helmet riffs. There is also something about the vocals, too, that I love. Hamilton has one of those voices that just fits the music so well. He created a great sound and rode it to a pretty successful career, I’m guessing. I’m sure he’s made a few bucks here and there.
As the latter half of Meantime unfolds, the band shows the heavy and somewhat weirdly abrasive nature that made their first record, Strap It On, one of my favorite early 90s records. “Turned Out” reminds me of the energy and feel of that first record a lot.
“He Feels Bad” is another helping of that heavy, sludge, jazz core. “Better” has some very underrated work by Stanier on it. The drum fills are pretty fucking great as they pep up a fairly straightforward song.
Due to my love for Strap It On, I’m pretty partial to “FBLA II” which is a sequel to the excellent “FBLA.” I will definitely write about this record before the end of the year. I could have easily chosen Strap It On to write about first, but I probably listened to Meantime more over the years, so it goes first.
As I think about it, I need to go back and give the other records another chance. I should probably go see them live again, too. Everyone needs a Helmet.
*****
See you tomorrow.
AI is just taunting me.
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