by Christopher J. Lee (@joonhai)
Mary Timony has come to inhabit a category of one. This may seem like an odd assessment given her frequent projects and collaborations over the last three decades, whether with Helium during the 1990s, Wild Flag (the one-off indie supergroup with Carrie Brownstein, Janet Weiss, and Rebecca Cole) slightly over a decade ago, or Ex Hex, the hard/garage-rock inspired outfit that has preoccupied her recording the past ten years. Timony epitomizes the rock-and-roll lifer, a journey-person musician who has tried out, tested, and integrated different genres through a steady output of albums, while also being comfortable as part of a trio or quartet. This new solo album feels different, however. Though she has never been absent from the scene, Untame the Tiger sounds like both a culmination of these prolific decades and a re-introduction. One gets the sense that Timony harbors this feeling as well.
“Check the situation, is it cruel or is it kind?” is the line that starts the album. It’s the kind of question that comes from someone who has experienced both forms of reception. It’s also the sort of query from someone about to try something entirely new and different. The opening track that is ignited by this lyric, “No Thirds,” is an edgy, folk-rock number that gestures less to the urbane indie sensibility found in Timony’s past work and more to the outlaw Americana style of an artist like Lucinda Williams. This isn’t a bad thing. The song establishes for the album a thrilling momentum through its unhesitant pacing and its acoustic/electric guitar interplay.
According to the album notes provided, Timony composed and recorded Untame the Tiger after the end of a long-term relationship and while caring for her parents, both of whom passed away during the two-year period of the LP’s making. The musical rush of “No Thirds” consequently sounds like an exorcism, if one incompletely realized. “Brand new day, it still hurts like hell,” she sings later in the song. Such acknowledged sentiments are balanced by an abiding need to venture forward. “Keep moving on now, never stay too long,” she shares, like revealing an internal monologue. “Let the sun shine on everything that’s wrong, I still wanna know what I’ve really never known.”
This perspective and sense of free spiritedness informs many of the songs that follow. “I wanna know what I don’t know now,” Timony imparts in the harsher and more angular second track, “Summer” – a tune more in character with her preceding work. Meanwhile, the third track, “Dominoes,” possesses a Rolling Stones vibe circa Exile on Main Street that recalls Liz Phair’s own famed reinterpretation of that double LP back in the day. Timony’s lyrics target her duplicitous romantic companion only to concede at the end, “You really can’t love without letting go.” Song by song, many of the circumstances described on Untame the Tiger have a second-person structure with Timony directly addressing someone else. Charting the terrain between good and bad faith in relationships, victimhood and personal responsibility, and the desire for a new start positioned against the inability to achieve that possibility shapes the themes of this album. The title track captures this ambivalent state of affairs, with Timony lamenting more than once, “Thought I was through with you, and the tiger was tamed. But now my brain is running hot, and I’m counting all the rain.”
Returning to the question opening her album, Timony deserves everything good coming her way. Untame the Tiger is Timony’s fifth solo album and her first in fifteen years, which feels like an unbelievably long time. With only nine tracks at forty minutes, there is no filler, and, as indicated, this album has some of her best lyrics. This LP does not possess the comparative sweetness found on her debut, Mountains, which experimented with piano (despite her esteemed guitar playing reputation) and had shades of the pop songcraft of figures like Suzanne Vega. Yet, despite the discomforting subject matter coursing throughout, this album isn’t entirely bitter either.
Taking the taste metaphor to its logical end, there is perhaps a certain saltiness to this recording – an LP born of grief and difficult life experience, with an artist at her peak who is able to take measure of such unwanted travails without either enmity or complete forgiveness. There is no act of return, whether to a state of innocence or simply to the past. A future of relative freedom also holds uncertainty. As the final track “Not the Only One” insinuates, togetherness may be the only imperfect option. The album title implies as much. Liberating the tiger to be its truest self can be a great thing, but you still have to live with the tiger.