Hellbender as a whole made three albums, but if we’re going to talk about the band from a “retrospective” point of view, it's important to mention a legacy that encompasses far more than just catchy, anthemic punk rock songs, like those found on 1997's Con Limón, Hellbender’s final album record. There are also New York Times Book Review ravings, gallery listings, and a namesake cocktail.
In 2009, two of them write, one makes art. Guitarist Wells Tower is author of the recent acclaimed short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, and bassist Al Burian is the man behind the long-running Burn Collector zine. Harrison Haynes, meanwhile, splits his time between making visual art and playing drums in Les Savy Fav.
That there were writers in the band isn’t much of a shock, even to someone who first encountered the work of Tower and Burian in a musical context. The lyrics on Con Limón read like aphorisms, bleakly funny from the titles on down: “You Gutted Me With a Switchblade Shaped Like a Telephone” is the best example, and it’s in a tradition that also includes Footprint of the American Chicken’s “Unsolicited Anthem for the Portland Hipsters.” As a band, Hellbender had the ability to capture the posturing of a scene while still tapping into the angst behind the clichés. Take the lyrics “Long distance is just a tool to keep us down,” or “Do you recognize this song/ This is our song/ My favorite slow jam/ My favorite quiet storm.” It’s hard to imagine any other punk-rooted bands playing the late-90s VFW circuit and referencing quiet storm in their lyrics.
As the earlier reference to Portland suggests, Hellbender were also a geographically-minded band, based at various points in the aforementioned Oregonian city as well as North Carolina. Con Limón’s travelogue also includes stops in South Dakota and New England, as well as the memorably titled “I-95 Is Tattooed On My Brain.” And while the trio could shift into slow-burn mode throughout the album, those distances don’t necessarily sound metaphorical: Haynes drums with a momentum that sounds essential, as though his kit was responsible for powering the band’s traversals of interstate highways.
A strong vein of knowing misanthropy runs through Con Limón: “Untrusting You,” in which the line “Aren’t you lonely yet?” is repeated again and again before giving way to a pair of rueful “God damn it”s, might be its apex. As much as accusations of romantic instability fly through the lyrics of these 10 songs, there’s an equal amount of guilt -- confessions made in the presences of judges and other authorities.
It’s a bitterness balanced by wry humor, however, exemplified by the album’s penultimate number, “A Song About Some Girls.” “This is a song that I wrote about some girls,” it begins, segueing into references to Jeeps, Coppertone, and Bob Seger. It’s also a scary prediction of what would become mall emo: anonymous female figures in the background and monstrously-sized “whoa-whoa” choruses that one can’t help but sing along to. Yet in this case, it’s the lack of depth that’s the joke: the song's protagonist has apparently wandered into the kind of track designed for stadium sing-alongs and quickly finds himself wholly unsuited for the role. It is, I suspect, no coincidence that the song is without accompanying lyrics in the liner notes.
The album comes to its bitter end with “Graveyarded.” Lyrically desperate, it inverts or makes explicit all that had been previously hidden: the distances described without romanticism; the literacy couched in paranoia and desperation; a landscape of dead-end jobs and dying momentum; and a narrator who’s “[a] million miles from home/ a blank slate/ a throw-away.” And while the jokey, funk-influenced hidden song that properly ends the album isn’t the band’s high point, its presence is an indicator of a greater truth about Hellbender: even when they reached their lowest emotional depth, they never lost their sense of humor.
1 Fake I.D.
2 You Gutted Me With a Switchblade Shaped Like a Telephone
3 Long Distance Phone Bill Runner
4 Untrusting You
5 I-95 is Tattooed on My Brain
6 Call Me When You're Dead
7 Make Up an Excuse
8 The Inevitable Social Awkwardness of the Junior High School Prom
9 Song About Some Girls
10 Graveyarded
