Mary Timony
Untame the Tiger
MERGE
At the top of the 21st century, no American songwriter meant more to me than Mary Timony. After five art-grunge recordings with the Matador label as Helium, and her Bowie-like Mind Science of the Mind collaboration with Shudder to Think’s Nathan Larson, the influential alt-tuning guitarist (ask Sleater-Kinney) and cooly emotive vocalist found magical realism, gully-deep melancholy, and Valkyrian folk-psych fantasy with her solo albums of 2000 and 2002, respectively, Mountains and The Golden Dove. Modally magnetic and touched by the spirit of European medieval composition (musically and lyrically), yet capable of rocking hard with weird abandon, no one sounded like Timony.
Such uniqueness, along with a willingness to hide behind self-created band names (including Wild Flag and Ex Hex) probably fragmented her audiences, as her last solo album was released almost 20 years ago. The newly unleashed Untame the Tiger still luxuriates in the dark fluid melancholy of yore, only this time with reasons beyond the fantastically poetic as Timony lost both of her parents and broke up a long-term relationship before its recording.
An Anglo folkie at heart, Timony welcomes Fairport Convention drummer Dave Mattacks during the sweet and sour prose of “Summer” and “Not the Only One” for dramatic rhythmic effect. While “Dominoes” humorously tackles the ins and outs of romantic entanglements in their untangling in a manner far clearer than on any of her early solo albums, the notion of unrelenting grief stonily becomes its own friendly entity on the country-inspired “The Guest.”
That newly found directness (well, maybe utilized during her Ex Hex era) is what makes songs such as “No Thirds” and “The Dream” so bold and brusque, as she relents to being “hurt like hell” on the former while commiting to a power ballad using the fairytale trappings of Mountains as a looking glass into a teary reflection of doubt and its dismay. While some of Untame the Tiger’s sonic language misses the sharpness of her early work, Timony has refined her knife’s-edge lyricism and her beyond-freak-folk musicality to a saber’s bloody tip.
