“I became this musician because of jazz. I mean, I still wake up every day and work on Charlie Parker’s Hot House!” Even with a broken finger, Helmet’s Page Hamilton is one of the all-time great heavy riffsmiths – but he owes it all to jazz
In LEFT, Page Hamilton may have just turned in Helmet’s most political album yet. Above a patented mix of drop-tuned riffs and hard-edged rhythmic displacement, the alt-metal icon sounds off on anything from cyclical patterns of U.S. gun violence (Gun Fluf) to the unearned, puffed-chest politicking of the modern-day Republican Party (Big Shot, Dislocated).
Though Hamilton tells Guitar World he’s generally avoided standing on a soapbox throughout Helmet’s nearly 35-year career, Left’s treatises still speak to a broader trend within his hefty songbook.
“It’s just character assassination,” he explains of a lyrical forte. “My ex-father-in-law said to me, ‘All you do is write ‘fuck you’ songs. They’re really good ‘fuck you’ songs, but they’re still just ‘fuck you’ songs.’ I told him, ‘Well, everybody has to be good at something, right?’”
To be sure, Left – the band’s ninth album, fourth since reuniting in 2004, and first in seven years – has Hamilton expressing himself with antagonistic, full-throated fervor. Helmet’s latest is likewise a nuanced, parameter-expanding release for the veteran unit. After a few years focusing on film-scoring projects, Hamilton got back into the post-hardcore groove at the top of 2023 to write the 11-song Left.
He and co-guitarist Dan Beeman generally juxtapose punishingly percussive rhythms with rich, 7th-and-11th incorporating chord phrasings – all the more impressive considering Hamilton tracked this all with a broken fretting finger – though the band scale down the sonic bombast for the tender Tell Me Again, an all-acoustic, string ensemble-assisted outing inspired by a confidant’s betrayal and the open C6 tuning of Led Zeppelin’s Friends.
While 1994’s Betty had Helmet taking a jarringly subversive noise-rock swing at jazz standard Beautiful Love – a stylistic mashup reflective of Hamilton’s studies at the Manhattan School of Music – the act takes a more traditional pass at John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme through Left’s closing Resolution.
Transposing Coltrane’s sax sublimity to his six-string, Hamilton exits the album with songbird-like fluidity and a few well-placed blue notes. It’s a standout moment, even if the Helmet leader figures some hardcore fans will wince at the fact that Left doesn’t go out with a gain-blaring bang.
“I didn’t get the blues songs on Led Zeppelin when I was 16,” Hamilton says through a parallel thought. “I was like, ‘I just want to hear Communication Breakdown, man!’ Then later, you realize that’s where they came from; that’s how they became Led Zeppelin. I became this musician because of jazz. I mean, I still wake up every day and work on Charlie Parker’s Hot House!”
Left is out now via earMUSIC.
