https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL0EaJTYGjA
Mary Timony's first prominent-ish band Helium were, like the Pixies, a Boston-area band who got played on 120 Minutes -- they also got her lusted after by Beavis and Butthead. They were largely immune to Pixies lessons about dynamics. They began as a multi-guitar noise-and-drone band (even Timony's singing had a flattened, droning way to them and was kept back in the mix), the American version of bands like Slowdive/ Swervedriver/ Ride/ My Bloody Valentine who won't be showing up on this countdown because too many thick guitar sounds hurt my ears.
But when I moved to Boston, Helium suddenly released
an EP called No Guitars -- a literal lie nonetheless signaling a real change of direction -- then an LP called the Magic City whose colorful finger-painted cover showed a candy house with bicycle-headlight antennae, and lollipop trees in front, and whose instrument listing joined rock instruments to mandolin, chamberlain, trumpet, and violin. I started going to their concerts; I even gave Timony jellybeans once during an opening act's set (and she greeted me a week later at a local coffee-house, making her by a wide margin the most famous person ever to think to do so).
By the time Mary Timony went solo, she'd refined a more spacious sense of arrangements, and a unique, often sinister melodic sense that might be informed by medieval plainsong, and/or by Arabian tunings. The most exotic parts of the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian" would fit straight into her oeuvre, although she'd have to slow the fast verses to half-speed and outline only a fairly perverse selection of their notes.
Guitar-rock never went away, though; Timony is a superb guitarist, not fast but urgent and precise and exploratory. (Her melodic sense may also just be what happens when you spend your nights thinking "what chord happens if I hold my fingers just like this???") And as fond as I am of her piano or chimes work, I ended up picking, as my favorite of her songs, one of the few approaching a Pixies-esque sense of rock tension/ release, as opposed to her usual tension/ tension.
She's stubborn, mind you: she gives us a triumphant half a chorus, then spends the second half downshifting. I don't insist that "Blood Tree" is a greater song than Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone", also a kiss-off to an ex-boyfriend, and a brilliantly shiny top-40 culmination of the abrupt soft-loud dynamic that Black Francis and company had once designed as an expression of mania. But I ended up dropping Clarkson's song off my list's final draft, because as glad as I am that it exists, it's a song you could assume and posit even if it didn't: a (flawless) assemblage of ideas then in currency. When Mary Timony grabs a popular idea, it's a fleeting impulse, and one never knows how alchemy will transform it except by listening.
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