THE FORMER HELIUM AND WILD FLAG D.C. ROCKER CAN STILL UNLEASH SOME DECIDEDLY UNTAME SOUNDS
By Gregory Adams
YOU CAN THANK the sturdy craftsmanship of the Gibson guitar company for some of the richness on Mary Timony’s new Untame the Tiger project. The U.S. Postal Service? Not so much.
When Timony began conceptualizing her latest solo effort — notably her first in 15 years — the D.C. veteran knew she wanted to explore more unplugged textures than the Dio-by-way-of-Seventies-power-pop stylings of her longtime Ex Hex project, or the twitchy bass rumblings she leans into as part of D.C. hardcore quartet Hammered Hulls. As such, she was reminded of a precious, Depression-era Gibson acoustic that had been tucked away in her late grandmother’s South Dakota farmhouse attic for the past 40 years. While an eccentric aunt gladly packed up the vintage piece and sent it on its way, it’s a marvel Timony can still strum it in one piece.
“It was just rolling around in this big cardboard box without a case; it got to my house and there was a big hole in the box, but those [guitars] were made so well,” Timony says through an incredulous laugh, noting that the six-string was re-intonated, but arrived miraculously undamaged.
Rich, canyon-sized strums naturally reverberate throughout Untame the Tiger pieces like “Dominoes” or the C&W-flavored “The Guest,” much of this returning to the suspended-fourth-juicing DADGAE tuning the musician has favored, off and on, for decades. But Timony — whose career has additionally included time with Nineties alt-icons Helium, early 2010’s supergroup Wild Flag and behind-the-scenes work as a guitar teacher/creative coach — also went through an unlearning process. Her laser-guided EBow layering, for instance, was performed as a pragmatic way to offset the pain in her picking wrist, owing to years of improper positioning.
“I was holding my hand wrong for a long time, and I was hunching over from teaching, so it was creating a lot of tension in my right arm,” she says, adding that a series of chiropractic sessions ultimately set her right. Nevertheless, the relaxed, string-sustaining EBow lines of album finale “Not the Only One” are set against intricately picked acoustic arpeggiation. With “Summer,” the album’s most untamed moment, Timony bends through a pair of wildly diverging solos inspired by a similarly stacked competition on Gerry Rafferty’s “The Long Way Round.”
“It made things a
