If you were to make a chart of the music of Mary Timony, from the early days of Autoclave here in D.C., and Helium in Boston, and on to her solo career, time in Wild Flag and Ex Hex, and current efforts in Hammered Hulls, it would be a "U"-shaped graphic with the tops of the "U" being where she was the loudest and the solo years being where things were fairly low volume. That's not to say that Mountains, her 2000 solo debut being reissued this week by Matador Records, is quiet, but that it favors favors a rudimentary approach to instrumentation without much reliance on feedback and wild guitars. In fact, in this brightly remastered edition from the famed Bob Weston, the record has an elemental, proto-classical power that's stronger than ever.
For those who'd been following Helium back then, 1997's double-punch of The Magic City and the No Guitars EP indicated that the artist at the helm was intent on redefining the terms of indie-rock. Each release saw the group who'd once been lumped in with other Yank shoegazers stripping things back and pursuing a kind of pseudo-folk-rock, one with a requisite lyrical imagery as well. At the time, I remember thinking how some of that seemed an almost ironic deconstruction of the hoary tropes of hard rock, but it's clearer now how those group journeys pointed the way for what Timony'd do on Mountains. Here, the spindly "Poison Moon" and "The Bell" are as simple and stripped down as anything from any folkie, but they're jarring and discordant still. "The Hour Glass" and "13 Bees" haunt too, their odd melodic-lines seeming like something misheard from a dream, an unfinished figure broken apart and taped together again. All throughout Mountains, Mary seems intent on confounding, even as she lays bare emotional truths, and plaintive yearnings. In some weird way, this is like an early Laura Nyro record, but Mountains is more skewed, more provocative in most ways. Contributions from Christina Files (Swirlies) and John McEntire (Tortoise) and Ash Bowie (Helium, Polvo) add odd punctuaction marks throughout these tracks, but the vision is all Mary's.
Amid the clutch of bonus tracks appended to this 20th anniversary edition of Mountains is a newly-recorded version of "Valley of One Thousand Perfumes", orchestrated by Joe Wong and mixed by Dave Fridmann (Mercury Rev). It's a stunning bit of business here, re-imagined now as something that owes as many debts to Kronos Quartet than it does to any of the bands in Timony's past. Here it serves as a sort of culmination of themes found on the record proper, expanded and made almost lush. None of the other bonus tracks really throw off the mood of Mountains and one appreciates the care that went into selecting them for this edition even if one sort of wishes there had been more of them. Still, Mountains has never sounded as brightly dark, as worthy of praise as anything by Slint or the post-rock pioneers of the era. If it's almost an outlier in Mary Timony's larger career, heard now it seems more significant, a highly personal document which affirms her unique powers as a songwriter and her judicious use of an unexpected style of guitar playing.
Mountains (20th Anniversary Expanded Edition) is out on Friday via Matador Records.
[Photo: Matador Records]