Timony To Rock 'Sco Friday

Ex-Helium Singer Brings Cerebral Pop to Oberlin

Mary Timony, once the creator of punk-edged temperamental pop with the Boston-based band Helium, explores less familiar, more surreal territory in her solo work, which she will be performing Friday night at the 'Sco at 10 p.m.

Timony's background roots her firmly in the world of independent rock, from her beginnings in D.C.-based Autoclave to her participation in various collaborations, including the 6ths (with Stephen Merritt of The Magnetic Fields) and Mind Science of the Mind (with members of Shudder to Think and the Dambuilders). Playing guitar and singing in Helium, she created a rough pop style with crunching Pixies-like guitar offset by airy vocals.

By their last album, Magic City, Helium was experimenting with new musical directions and subjects, making forays into imaginative territory not usually covered by the introspective indie-rock bands around them. Timony takes this trajectory even further in her solo work. Her new album, Mountains, relies more on harpsichord, piano and strings than on conventional rock instrumentation, and tells stories of peasants and seductive demons.

The strongest parts of the recording occur when Timony augments the material of fantasy novels and fairy tales with scenes rooted in reality. In "The Hour Glass," she sings, "I do not want to fight, work, or remember how we did not get along/ I've given you my last bowl of understanding, to watch it speared like a carcass/ on a knife. This is the knife of life, work, and independence, we are only free at night, but that is when we sleep." In passages like this, Timony reveals her fantasies as willful but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to depart from everyday concerns, creating a tension which is in the end more satisfying than the pure fantasy of some of her other songs.

The album's greatest strength musically lies as well in the aggressive pop background which Mary Timony brings to her quasi-historical explorations. The straightforward, driving song structures of Helium carry over into the sparser instrumentation of Timony's solo work to give an almost meditative, repetitive, minimalist quality to some songs This has the potential to create a compelling live performance.

At times, the minor keys and melodramatic lyrics which characterize some of the songs on this album are hard to take seriously. For instance, in "I Fire Myself," she sings, "I walk through the everlasting pit/ A demon lured me into his bedwhere I fell into a poisoned sleep." Timony herself has said that the medieval motif began as a joke, and she views the fantasy theme with a certain amount of circumspection.

Despite such irony, there is unquestionable sincerity in many of the songs on the album, as there is sure to be in Timony's live performance, as she negotiates the intersection of the personal and the magical.

Mary Timony performs Friday, Sept. 22 in the 'Sco. Churchbuilder opens. Show starts at 10p.m.. $5 w/OCID, $7 without.