[review 2007: honourable mentions]

If you bought The Shapes We Make, you probably already know that you’re part of a small but devoted group of Mary Timony fans. You probably remember Helium, remember The Dirt of Luck, remember the too-long-by-half fallow period between Helium’s breakup and Timony’s first solo album. You made it through Timony’s ren-faire period, and maybe even liked it very much. And then, two years ago, you heard a Mary Timony album that made you stand up and take notice: Ex Hex is Timony’s best solo outing to date, tossing a lot of the medieval-music trappings and charging ahead with the hardest guitar riffs of her career and the amps turned up to eleven. Of course, once you’ve made the breakthrough album (in a career littered with left turns and breakthroughs), what do you do for an encore?

In Timony’s case, you form another band. She’s always had other people play on her albums, but for The Shapes We Make the Boston-by-way-of-D.C. indie rocker felt the contributions of her backing band were important enough to warrant giving them full credit for the album’s sound. The Shapes We Make does sound more like the product of a full band than Ex Hex, but that could be just as much an intentional shift away from Mary Timony as rock star; the new album is the more mild-mannered sibling to Ex Hex’s guitar hero acrobatics and attitude. It’s not as euphoric an album, and there’s a greater tendency towards vaguely proggy guitar jams. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as Timony’s quite good at finding a balance between too straightforward and too wankish (”Curious Minds” is a really good example), but it does mean Timony’s new album occupies a slightly different, less immediate headspace.

The most direct songs tend to be the most successful initially, with “Sharpshooter” and “Summer’s Fawn” galloping along at a decent clip. “Pause/Off” contains some very obvious political jabs at a time when most artists are content to make veiled references to the war and the Bush administration. It’s hard to mistake the intent of “Get your laws off my body, mister / pause/off, Supreme Court misters / don’t mess around with me and my sisters.” This is especially notable considering Timony’s own tendencies in the past to use old-tyme settings and characters in favour of more contemporary references; it’s a lot easier to use “Pause/Off” as a rallying cry than, say, “Musik and Charming Melodee.”

Occasionally the album dips into overly ponderous territory; “Window” and “Pink Clouds” are pleasant but not particularly interesting, and they occur late in the album, which is just when Ex Hex was finding a second wind. But the real issue doesn’t necessarily lie with the album as a piece of music, but rather as a historical artifact. Over a decade into her career, Timony’s still working her own particular groove. Many interviews have focused on her unwillingness to adapt to the changing winds of “indie rock,” and it’s quite true—by virtue of catering to her own whims, which actually haven’t changed too drastically over the years even with the medieval obsessions, Timony has unintentionally cast herself as a maverick in opposition to the increasingly corporate indie rock scene. But her stalwart independence has its price: The Shapes We Make, though it doesn’t sound particularly dated or old, is unlikely to win many new converts because this album shares much the same spirit with albums she made in the late 90s, and a lot of people have moved on.

So, if you’re a fan of The Shapes We Make—and I definitely am—what does this all mean, exactly? Is Timony a cult figure whose appeal lies partially in our nostalgia for when “indie rock” wasn’t such a meaningless term? Does she have anything genuinely new to bring to the table, or is she just extremely good at refining the same basic sound from her Helium days? Why am I even asking these questions of Timony when I might not necessarily ask them of, say, Yo La Tengo or Sonic Youth or any of a hundred other bands that have survived from the last decade? And finally, just because I’m self-indulgent at the best of times: does liking this album mean I’m getting old?