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People often say that Meantime is the best Helmet album. Well, people also voted Rick Perry into an unprecedented third term as Governor of Texas, so maybe it's time to stop listening to those assholes, eh? (except me, because I'm right) Fact is, Strap It On is half an hour of Helmet at their noisy, grimy, 3-chord peak, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fucking pansy whose copy of the Page Hamilton solo record Size Matters probably has cum stains all over the CD booklet.
Strap It On opens with some guitar skronk followed by a pounding 6/8 pattern that lets you know this band is not fucking around. The track this introduces, "Repetition", is full of Helmet's trademark syncopated, bone-crushing drop-D riffs, and is capped by a ferociously atonal Page Hamilton solo. So is every track on here. Helmet at this point was not concerned with variety, but rather with kicking your head in. Sure, they essentially had the same goal in mind on Meantime, but that record was made with a major-label budget and a slicked-up sound. Every snare hit on that album was a simulation created by the mixing engineer, for Chrissakes! There is none of that here. Half the time, you can't discern that the guitars are playing chords, because their tone is calculated for sheer volume and impact, and nothing but. The drum sound is full of industrial-esque gated reverb that makes each THWACK of the snare resonate through your skull, and the bass is like 50000 volts through your intestines. This is a record that is meant to be listened to LOUD.
The songs here are so focused on rhythm that some critics (and apparently former drummer John Stanier) have called Helmet's music math rock. I dunno about that- if a few quirky phrasings and the occasional 7 or 15-beat pattern makes you math rock, then Superunknown by Soundgarden is a math rock record too! What this really is, if anything, is proto-nu-metal, but before you send me angry letters for lumping Helmet in with Papa Roach or something, let me stress that this is free of the fake angst, rap-rock trappings, and lifeless production that current nu-metal is ruined by. But the focus on riffs over solos, shouts over vocal melodies, and white-funk drum patterns (though that does sell the killer drumming on this record short) certainly led to that atrocious brand of music, for better or for worse. Again, though, would fucking Linkin Park or whoever have done a song like the song that closes this record, "Murder"? Seriously, listen to this shit-
I rest my case.
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