Helmet is not a pretty band, nor does it play pretty pop music. Yet the New York City quartet recently found itself coveted by virtually every major American record company.
Helmet specializes in rigorously orchestrated aural assaults, with little regard for such pop niceties as melody lines and singing.
It nonetheless has become the underground band of the moment and has been snowed under by major-label offers in recent months. (Helmet headlines Saturday at Cabaret Metro.)
”That`s all over now,” says singer-guitarist Page Hamilton, sounding a bit relieved after the quartet`s recent signing to Interscope Records.
Hamilton says the move upward in the pop food chain is hardly a compromise, just a more efficient means of making sure the band`s music is heard by more people.
”As far as I`m concerned, being with a major label exists in another world from the one I`m in,” he says. ”When it comes time to play, the excitement is the same as it was two years ago.”
Hamilton says the band plans to record its major-label debut in Chicago next week with Steve Albini producing.
Helmet`s 1990 debut, ”Strap It On” (Amphetamine Reptile), has acquired the kind of word-of-mouth buzz that even the most carefully orchestrated public-relations campaigns can`t buy.
The group occupies a world somewhere between Metallica and Sonic Youth, a dark, ominous grid of harsh rhythms and dense guitar textures.
The four musicians-guitarists Hamilton and Peter Mengede, drummer John Stanier and bassist Henry Bogdan-string out the tension until the music seems ready to snap, then shift gears with jolting precision.
Hamilton came from a heavy jazz background and wasn`t introduced to punk rock until he joined Band of Susans in 1988. Later that year he played with Glenn Branca, whose avant-garde guitar compositions were an inspiration.
”It was all open-tuned guitars playing these incredibly simple rhythms in different time signatures,” Hamilton says. ”That was the environment Helmet was born in.”
”I saw Helmet as wanting to be like Aerosmith was in 1975-76,” he adds. ”Simple arrangements played intensely.”
Hamilton says he leaves nothing to chance when writing songs.
”It has to be tightly composed to be tightly played,” he says. ”It`s four guys in a rhythm continuum playing steady pulls, and it would destroy the impact if it wasn`t absolutely tight. It`s the kind of music I could hear being done really well with violins as well as guitars.”
What separates Helmet from other noise bands is the way it uses silence.
”I found that space is more important than the sound you make: Silence is the power,” Hamilton says. ”We`ll pull back completely to create what some people have called a `deafening silence,` and then come back hard. There`s so much more air to move the cones in the speakers that it sounds like a sledgehammer.”
Similarly, Hamilton likes to leave a lot of room in his lyrics for the listener`s imagination.
”You can describe something literally, but it`s not that interesting,”
he says. ”With Bruce Springsteen you know what all the songs are about, and he can pull that off because he does it well. But I like it when someone comes up and tells me what he thinks one of my songs is about, even if he`s totally off base.”
”Sinatra,” for example, isn`t about the famed singer but about a woman who happens to live in Sinatra`s hometown of Hoboken, N.J. The title is drawn from one almost incidental line: ”It`s Sinatra`s world, she just lives in it.”
Less oblique is ”FBLA,” which refers to Future Business Leaders of America.
”I saw punk-rock fans as becoming our FBLA, the same way the pot-smoking hippies of the `60s turned into insurance salesmen,” Hamilton says. ”There`s nothing wrong with being an insurance salesman, but why can`t that youthful intensity be maintained in the business world or in raising a family? Why not seek truth, cathartic experiences, all through life?”
