Helmet - Dead to the World

Pitchfork 68

It’s hard to calculate just how pervasive Helmet founder Page Hamilton’s influence has been, but at one point during the mid-90’s it seemed as if his footprints were all over the heavy metal and alt-rock landscape. You could make a strong case that there are traces of Hamilton’s style in the music of Tool, the Deftones, and even the likes of Weezer and the Smashing Pumpkins. Helmet’s reach makes sense given that the band's career arc traversed multiple scenes in a short time. Starting out with one foot in New York’s avant-garde sphere following Hamilton’s departure from Glenn Branca’s Band of Susans, Helmet’s earliest releases on the iconic indie label Amphetamine Reptile in ’89-’90 landed them in the middle of a burgeoning underground wave that included other cult acts like Cows, Killdozer, Today Is the Day, and others.

Along the way, Helmet also became associated with the artier side of New York’s hardcore and post-hardcore circles alongside Quicksand and Orange 9mm. Metal audiences—and bands like Sepultura and Pantera —embraced them as well. By 1994, Helmet found themselves in the thick of the alternative rock zeitgeist as their video for “Milktoast,” their contribution to The Crow soundtrack, scored heavy rotation on MTV. And just prior to the band’s breakup in the late ’90s, Helmet toured with Korn and Limp Bizkit.

Hamilton’s hypnotic, earworm-like riffs have a way of instantly getting under your skin and sticking to your brain like gum. So does the grooving but strangely counter-intuitive approach to rhythm that sets the band's sound apart to this day. So it’s easy to see why Helmet's signature style rubbed off so readily on other bands. In fact, it's hard to imagine Meshuggah or the Dillinger Escape Plan evolving the way they did without Hamilton’s proto math-metal vocabulary to build on.

But in spite of his master’s degree in jazz composition, Hamilton imposed a rigid, primitivistic structural frame on Helmet’s music that he's never completely broken free of. Most of the time, he hasn't really tried. Not unlike Guided By Voices mastermind Bob Pollard, Hamilton has more or less recycled the same formula for Helmet’s entire career, insisting on defining the band by its limits even long after it was creatively expedient to do so—shocking when you consider that, in his time away from Helmet, Hamilton played with Bowie and Joe Henry, nearly joined Wire, and worked on film scores with composer Elliot Goldenthal.

The good news is that Hamilton takes more chances than he ever has on Dead to the World, the band's eighth studio album and fourth since Hamilton re-launched the Helmet brand with a revolving cast of side musicians. Things start out promisingly enough when, on album opener “Life or Death,” Hamilton manages to find the elusive middle ground between the tinny grain of the band’s early (and recent) non-album singles and the lush, pumped-up-for-airplay tone of the first Helmet 2.0 album, 2004’s Size Matters.

Hamilton also explores melody more fearlessly than ever. On “Bad News,” he nods at Revolver-era Beatles. And the title track might be the most layered and spacious of anything Hamilton's ever released under the Helmet name, with its somber cello occupying a prominent place in the mix. Strings play a key role on the eerie “Expect the World” as well. Meanwhile, “Look Alive,” with its haunting vocal line, is arguably the first time that a Helmet tune has conveyed genuine pathos. And when Hamilton slows down and reprises "Life or Death" at the end of the album, you can make out the harmonic fabric of his chords more clearly than ever before. But “Green Shirt,” his attempt at spry pop, lands too close to the ill-conceived hard rock bubblegum of Lita Ford’s “Kiss Me Deadly” to make sense as a Helmet tune.

Going all the way back to 1994’s Betty—Helmet's only other album with genuine variation —Hamilton proved that he was actually capable of introducing melody into the band's vocabulary without dulling its edge. Hamilton may have started out as a barking vocalist, but he developed into a tunesmith at a time when he was still coming up with vital, intricate riffs. Both Betty and 1997’s Aftertaste contain examples of Hamilton ingeniously weaving vocals and riffs together, expanding while also staying true to Helmet’s core sound.

Try, for example, to sing a song like “It's Easy to Get Bored” while playing (or even air-guitaring) the rhythm guitar part without tripping up. In such cases, Hamilton’s experimental instincts and songwriting acumen came together seamlessly. That doesn't happen nearly enough on Dead to the World, where too much of the material stumbles in a confused attempt to marry Hamilton’s increasingly generic pop sensibilities with the savagery of classic-era Helmet. The two elements don’t gel, and both sound forced.

Longtime fans will recognize touches of that old Helmet magic in songs like “Red Scare” and “Die Alone,” with its spiraling riff and 3-on-4 rhythm that's long been one of the band's most recognizable hallmarks. But Hamilton has undeniably lost some of the touch that captivated his audience the first time around. Up ‘til the band's breakup in ’98, Hamilton's elliptical lyrics were marked by an intellectual distance that created a rich space between the words and the music—and, crucially, separated Helmet from the glut of their angst- and rage-driven peers.

Since 2004, Hamilton has written more openly about relationships, which might have added texture to the music if his lyrics weren't so painfully one-sided and mean-spirited. Not to mention that he continues to attack New Age ideals, as he did all the way back on the early non-LP track “Shirley MacLaine.” To still be harping on the same topic almost 30 years later points to an alarming lack of growth and self-awareness. At least back then, the quirks in Hamilton's lyrics gave them character.

Now, when he growls embarrassing lines like “Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!” at the end of “I <3 My Guru,” Hamilton just comes off like an aging, bitter misanthrope with no substance to offer in place of vacuity that still bothers him so much. (Try moving out of L.A., maybe?) Lyrics aside, the elephant in the room on any latter-day Helmet release is the absence of founding drummer John Stanier. Before Stanier re-invented himself as an agile, polyrhythm-juggling finesse player in Battles, he was basically a one-trick pony whose ultra-tight snare crack became as integral to Helmet's sound as Hamilton's riffs.

Stanier's brute simplicity provided the yin the Hamilton's yang, and the band hasn't really been the same since his departure. It's encouraging to see Hamilton reaching for new modes of expression on Dead to the World. Ultimately, though, after making such an indelible and unique contribution to the language of modern heavy rock, Hamilton continues to show that he's hemmed-in by the style he invented.