Strap It On

As influential as they obviously were on certain varieties of 90s heavy rock and pseudo-metal, it's surprising how Helmet never quite reached the mainstream during that gilded age of alternative music. They were - dare I say it - unsung. It's sad, because in the first half of the 90s they created three albums of some of the best rock music that decade had to offer. "Strap It On" is the first of these albums, and the old stuff is always the best stuff. Press the play button and prepare for thirty minutes of raw, cramped, frantic material.

This is one of Helmet’s most post-hardcore influenced albums, but it isn’t the whiny, noodly Dance Gavin Dance variety. Gnashing three-note riffs, guitar noises and wall-of-sound “core chords” grind away over an incredibly punchy drum & bass section. Page Hamilton is yelling at the top of his lungs as usual, preferring that vocal style and only really giving clean singing predominance in “Make Room”. The vocal lines are sparse in a way that feels like you're not really supposed to pay much attention to them - part of the Helmet signature sound. Hamilton also handles the lead guitar parts, which are chaotic but not in the Jeff Hanneman sense, with some technique involved. No, these leads are played with no technique at all - Hamilton just randomly rakes his pick across the strings, creating abrasive noises and sounding like he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing. It’s a unique type of solo and doesn’t sound like a man trying to play one and failing miserably. It sounds like a man using the guitar as a noise instrument. He's taking all the undesirable sounds that come from high-gain guitar playing and sculpting them into a desirable shape. Two tracks on this record are almost wholly made up of guitar noises: "Sinatra" and "Murder". “No one’s safe!” Hamilton yells on the latter, while noises that sound like scrap metal being fed into a wood chipper swarm around him.

No matter how noisy it gets, each song still finds a way to stick in your head. This stuff can’t afford to take time in the technicality department to jam through as quickly as it can, and its simplicity doesn’t bring it down hardly at all. You’ll not forget the tension-building breakdown after the intro of “FBLA” that reduces the track to silence, broken suddenly by Hamilton’s shout. Same with the groove metal riffing in “Blacktop” (the most metal-oriented track on the album), which creates an addictive headbang-worthy atmosphere. The musicianship is far from technical, but the band isn't afraid to play with odd time signatures, such as the alternation between 6/8 and 12/8 in “Repetition” and the 7/4 in "Distracted". A way to keep things interesting while preserving the simple guitar, drum, and bass line formula. Helmet has a winning combination of songwriting tactics here, and there's really only one major imperfection to be noticed: the arrangements. They can get a bit predictable with the two verses & choruses, solo, chorus, out formula, but the band was new & unrefined at the time and their songwriting would improve on their next album.

In case you haven't guessed from the musical description so far, this isn't a metal record. It's a 90s heavy rock record that contains many of the elements that make a lot of 90s heavy rock bad. Don't let that discourage you, though. Helmet uses those elements in a way that's more natural & enjoyable than most and ends up with a release that delivers a lot for its short runtime. Aggression in the form of basic rock beats, semi-unclean vocals and percussive guitar noises never sounded so good.

New York City. 1990. The Bowery. An urban wasteland long since re-imagined. Helmet strides into CBGB's to unleash a staccato fury of unrepentant lock-step, drop-D riffage on an unsuspecting crowd of NYC no-wave noisniks, post-punks, hardcore skate-kids, and suburban bridge-and-tunnel heshers. None of whom know what to expect from this quartet of clean-cut preppie looking kids. But certainly not this hellacious riot-in-a-prison death march stomp of weird jazzy undertones and off-time signatures squirreling away beneath a racket of caustic, choppy, die-cut sledgehammer metal grooves. It's a new sound, one that will find its way across America in less than two years, but for now, the bottom drops out on a NYC crowd completely unprepared to endure this blitz. Helmet wasn't the only one dropping bombs in 1990. A whole scene was growing around the fall-out from post-punk, hardcore, and thrash in late '80's/early 90's New York. Bands like Prong, Unsane, Cop Shoot Cop, and Quicksand were sprouting up and taking over. But it was Helmet who refined the sound down to its finest, most diamond hard quality, who took the aesthetic to its heaviest levels, and then blew up into a near mainstream phenomenon with almost obscene levels of influence across a variety of underground scenes.

More than two decades on, it is hard to hear what made Helmet so innovative and original back then but the combination of explosively propulsive start/stop riffing, tight lock-step rhythmic syncopation, and gritty free-jazz noise freak-outs was a whole new thing. Combine that with the band's image: four dudes with crew cuts dressed in polo shirts and shorts who look more like tennis instructors than violently abrasive Lower East Side musicians and it is easy to understand how they could've touched off a sensation. That sound: of sandpaper scraping the surface of your ears; of heavy grooves just off-time enough to keep you guessing; of heaviness so crushing it stops your heart, it's all there. From the first second of "Repetition" to the last note of "Murder" and all twenty-nine minutes in-between, Strap It On catches Helmet rough and raw, primal and carnivorous. Ready to make a name for themselves with nine tracks that pile-up like a car crash.

Despite a somewhat papery-thin production sound (this record was clearly made on the cheap), Page Hamilton and Peter Mengede wield their guitars like bludgeons, ripping through the thin recorded sound with one nail sharp, jagged glass groove after another. Henry Bogdan's low-end rumbles like an F-Train through the East Broadway station while John Stanier plays one of the tightest kit in history. His precision performances on the drums are legendary. And this is a great early document of his style. Page meanwhile alternates between two distinct vocal stylings: atonal yelling and slightly amelodic singing. And his soloing interstitches post-Ornette free jazz with Sonic Youth-esque noise abrasions. It's a heady mix of ranging influences, offering something for everyone, and bringing together disparate scenes and sounds. Small wonder Helmet fans cut a swath across the Gen. X underground.

Helmet's Strap It On was the shot across the bow, a warning to all those throughout the hardcore, noise, and metal underground that a new band was muscling in with a sound set to ignite the world. And despite its various minor imperfections, Strap It On accurately presaged the devastating consequences that Helmet's follow-up record (Meantime) would deliver. Promised here, fulfilled there: Strap It On remains timeless and essential listening.

Now here’s a band that definitely deserved more attention than they got. Their type of music is hard to describe. It sounds pretty heavy but it’s not typical metal. It sounds more like hardcore at times. They certainly sound unique. I really can’t think of anyone else who sounds like them.

I don’t like this quite as much as the next two albums they did, but it’s still a perfectly decent debut. One of the things I like most about this band is their ability to create simple guitar riffs that manage to be very catchy without getting boring. This would become more evident on later albums but even here, songs like Bad Mood already utilise this technique well.

The best song on here is FBLA and it’s also the heaviest track on the album. It has a faster pace to it than the other songs although it never reaches thrash metal intensity. It has more in common with hardcore especially the vocals which are pretty generic yelling for the most part. Another good song is Sinatra. It’s the darkest song on here and has a very heavy main riff. This was actually covered by the Deftones who cite Helmet as a big influence on their sound. Fear not, Helmet is a much better band than the Deftones. At least they aren’t afraid of playing solos and there are some good ones on here. I especially like the solos featured on Repetition and FBLA.

The only real problem this album has is the production. While not being really bad or anything, it’s not exactly crystal clear. If you’ve never heard this band before, I would recommend checking out Meantime and Betty first before getting this album.