She is Mary Timony, an uncompromising indie rocker from Boston. Mary’s personal history is a mystery to me because there seems to me a lack of cohesive information about her in the internet. Which, to say the least, is not necessarily a bad thing because her more important legacy is in her music, not her life story. She’s been in a handful of bands before going solo, and she’s most known for fronting the band Helium in the early 1990’s. Prior to Helium, she was a member of the band Autoclave. She’s also currently involved with the space-rock band Green 4 as well as Spells, a collaboration with Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein.

I first heard her through my favorite computer program of all time, Real Rhapsody (I really do seem to find most of my new favorite artists there). While listening to PJ Harvey, I saw Helium listed in Polly’s contemporaries column, along with Cat Power, Kristen Hersh and Liz Phair. After a few listens of Helium’s 1995 album The Dirt of Luck I promptly went out to buy the CD. It wasn’t until just recently that I’d discovered that Mary had gone solo and had already released two albums under her own name, 2000’s Mountains and 2002’s The Golden Dove (Matador Records). I thought I loved Helium, but Mary has taken her original sound and made it something even more creative and beautiful.

The noise she makes is somewhere between indie rock, progressive rock, and noise pop—that’s what she’s labeled as, anyway. Mary’s voice is deep and somewhat husky, a nice change from that childish high pitch that seems to inhabit so many rock women. Her vocals are quite unconventional, rooted in something that appears to be somewhat melodic but in a more consistent tone. Sometimes she doesn’t even bother harmonizing with the music and that suits the songs just fine, as she doesn’t feel the need to belt out her lyrics. When she does harmonize, as she does in “The Owl’s Escape”, her voice’s melodic undertones make the sweeping piano-based song dramatic but not over-powering. Throughout The Golden Dove, Mary plays most of the instruments, her main pleasure being the guitar. Like most indie rockers of her generation, the music is often raw and a little dirty, but throw in a few subtle guitar riffs over a progressive beat, as she does in “Musik and the Charming Melodee”, you have something quite catchy and compelling, in the way that a true indie rocker can. Mary also seems to love to change the tempo within her songs, taking you through a sonic journey, rather than simply letting you nod along. There’s something pretty—if not a little artsy—in her music, as well as something dark and mysterious, as you’ll find in the cinematic “14 Horses”.

She’s captured me in that her music is like nothing I’ve ever heard. Just by listening to The Golden Dove’s opening track, “Look a Ghost in the Eye”, you’ll immediately understand how twangy and gritty progressive guitars are supposed to be put correctly in the same song as melodramatic string arrangements and moderately monotone vocals and still be a very catchy and fun song. Mary somehow manages to create very compelling musical compositions out of gritty guitars, which is something you hear more and more of these days, but Mary’s been doing it since her early days in Helium. The closest Helium connection on this record is probably “Blood Tree”, a song that starts off sounding very dark and dramatic, but suddenly increases tempo and is fun to sing along to.

What makes her so important is that it’s clear that she’s not concerned with making her music accessible to everyone. She enjoys being unconventional, but that doesn’t mean she’s not making good music. She’s just got another approach to it. Mary somehow manages to take odd arrangements and make it work. While she does a fabulous job of creating catchy beats, she’s more concerned with composing something more complex. If she had taken the bulk of the up-tempo music that makes up “Ant’s Dance” and strung it through the whole song, it’s easily radio-playable. But since she sticks those mid-tempo twangy guitar intervals in there, it makes you appreciate how much more interesting the song actually is the way Mary chose to create it.

She’s worth your ears in the same way that Cat Power is—it’s something you’ve never heard before and is bound to become your new favorite. I have yet to hear another artist who combines musical composition and vocals the way Mary Timony does. Granted, not everyone will be able to appreciate this kind of raw complexity, but I choose to believe that the reason why more artists haven’t followed in Mary’s footsteps is that it’s just too difficult to recreate.

She gets bonus points some very bizarre lyrics. Mary is quite the visual poet. While it’s sometimes difficult to hear her lyrics as she sings them, what you can hear paints quite a visual picture... “Look a ghost in the eye every day / can you see the snake in the sky on a clear day / look a specter in the face with no disgrace / some will fly away and some will chase.”