Helmet. It’s hard not to love a good Helmet show. The music is raucous and loud, packed to the musical gills with post-grunge frustration – a time when angst turned morphed into anger.
Watching them play at The New Vintage Saturday night took me back in time for 90 minutes. First, of all the band is currently on tour in support of the 20th anniversary of their breakthrough record Betty, so they opened the set with a full beginning-to-end performance that album. Frontman Page Hamilton lit the match with “Wilma’s Rainbow” and followed it all the way down musical the fuse to explode in our ears with the album ending “Sam Hell”.
But the band wasn’t finished after wrapping up Betty. The ended the set by digging into their deep catalog and playing some fan favorites, starting with “Sinatra” from the bands 1990 debut, Strap It On. A moment that evoked another 90’s memory – seeing Helmet play that song when I was a teenager and the band opened for Marilyn Manson on the Anti-Christ Superstar tour when it came to Louisville Gardens. The protesters, the controversy, and being fifteen and stuck in the middle of the ongoing battle for my soul between Rock Gods and Biblical Gods.
And it occurred to me how little Hamilton’s aged in the intervening 20 years, a little more gray, perhaps – but on the whole he sounds as pissed off and viral as ever.
By the time the band finished the 24 song set with “Turned Out” we were all adequately satisfied that we had been taken back and dropped off right in the middle of 1995. But eventually the guitars fell quiet, and the bar filled with the soft hum of amplifiers and I knew that my evening of hard rock nostalgia officially came to an end. And even though it was only for an evening, it was a nice stroll back and I thank Helmet for taking us.
