Helmet - Meantime

Impressive aural assault and battery from N.Y. sludgecore act. Drink deeply of this if your cuppa is a tighter, tougher version of the Sabs circa "War Pigs." --Jeff Bateman Amazon.com

yeah it's great 3.5 stars

It might get boring but it's still awesome nice heavy riffs and it's just cool.I really hate the fact that this band is mostly just into that gay gangsta music and only rock is a few percent of what they like,i don't know i heard that somewhere.But anyway back to this cd some songs might get boring but the other songs are awesome they're heavy and great if you like them check this out you will like this especially if you like alternative metal i guess, then listen to something way heavier and faster than this like some children of bodom now there's some real guitar players they should'nt even be in the same category than helmet but that's way better May 26, 2008

Helmet's best

Thsi is Helmet's best album. Deceptively simplistic yet really Paige is a very complex guitarist. I saw Helmet in concert with only a few people in the room way back when this CD first came out and it was awesome. Very good, very heavy, riff-oriented stuff on this CD. Standout tracks: In The Meantime, Unsung. December 21, 2007

does anyone still listen to this band ?

boring music. very overrated.

where is Helmet now ? prob. working at 7-11

July 19, 2006

A Mammoth Album

Strange....I keep reading all of these references to Helmet being the originators of nu-metal yet, when this album was released, the concept of nu-metal had not yet even begun to brew inside the mind of some soulless marketing executive, itching to brandish a newer and more simplistic sound to attract the masses with a short attention span. One can certainly make a path from Helmet to the spawn of nu-metal that followed a few years later if they felt so inclined but if you dig a little deeper, nu-metal only shares the most basic traits with this band that offered so much more to anyone who cared to listen.

In some ways, it almost seems strange to slap the "metal" tag on a band like Helmet. Sure, they wrote this album that is bludgeoningly heavy with songs that would blow your head clean off your body from the outset but beyond that, Helmet shared little with the dyed-in-the-wool metal bands from the early 1990's.

I suppose that this is where the whole nu-metal tag comes in, due to the nu-metal kingpins to follow utilizing the stop-start riffing that Helmet mastered out of the gate. However, those comparisons end when you get into these songs.

Unlike Korn and Deftones that followed, Helmet combined that riffing style with head-snapping time changes, absolutely monster grooves and a strange combination of vast musical influence filtered through a seemingly minimalist approach, all of this done with no use of samples, rapping or tortured soul gimmicks. Helmet was strictly about the music.

Maybe this is why their flirtation with the mainstream didn't last. They had nothing by way of gimmicks to offer the growing number of angst-filled teens that were a year or so away from the transition from grungy teen to Johnathan Davis impersonator. For those (and there are many of them) always on the hunt for the next fad to grasp onto for lack of true identity, Helmet provided those of us looking for music with substance an album that still could blow us away almost 15 years after it appeared on store shelves. "Meantime" is precisely that album. July 13, 2006

The gospel according to Page

From the moment I heard "Strap It On" blasting in a little bar in NJ back in 1990, I have worshipped Helmet. This album, in particular, represents to me the ultimate hard rock achievement - massive groove, killer guitar sound, and intelligent, angry lyrics. True, they never had a flashy singer with much vocal range, but a really dynamic vocalist would have sounded out of place over this music. As complicated as it sometimes got rhythmically, Helmet was always a very "minimalist" sounding band.

To the disinterested ear, this could easily sound like the same song over and over; all of the songs are in "Drop-D" tuning, and all but one (Unsung) are in the key of D. But the grooves that Page Hamilton concocted are tremendously diverse. He perfected the art of "adding a beat" to his riffs at certain key points, resulting in very subtle shifts that catch the listener by surprise; the solo in "Ironhead" and the middle section of "Unsung" are two prime examples. He also knew how to write riffs in 5/4 that flow naturally ("Better," "Turned Out"); and he came close to writing a big-band swing tune for Helmet with "Give It."

Sonically, this album showed a quantum leap over the low-fi production of their debut, "Strap It On." Every single note and drum crack is well-defined; the guitar solo in "Turned Out" sounds like a guitar vomiting. And "FBLA II" features John Stanier's all time tastiest drum fills.

If you never heard this album, I'm sorry you missed out on such an amazing band. But if this album came out today, it would still sound fresh! Buy it! November 2, 2005

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