Sebadoh “Vampire”
Helium “Baby Vampire Made Me” “Wanna Be A Vampire Too, Baby”

Today, three songs about the undead, all alt-rock from the Commonwealth. But it’s turned into fair warning (to me) that when you pick songs by title you can blunder into deeper, more harrowing waters than you intended.

The vampire in Sebadoh’s “Vampire,” off 1992’s Rocking The Forest, is needy and grasping, playing passive-aggressive games, sucking the life out of the relationship and the air out of the room. Somehow they managed to even produce a passive-aggressive arrangement. Stinging guitar work through amps distorted to the verge of failure, often tuned down in the mix, are set against mellow vocals and thrumming indie guitar swing.

Mary Timony and co. shoehorned the off-kilter rhythms of the Fall and My Bloody Valentine’s gauzy guitarscapes into a uniquely fractured, doomy style on their early work. Helium’s A/B burners “Baby Vampire Made Me” and “Wanna Be A Vampire Too, Baby” from 1994 EP Pirate Prude exploits this heavy trip to go real dark–diving into the real-life horror of an unwanted pregnancy and abortion.

In “Baby Vampire Made Me,” the vampire is in the womb, not a gift but a parasite, and it threatens to turn the woman into a vampire as well, latched on to a would-be father the verses address. Around 4:40 the song coalesces into an almost-bluesy riff and the words turns elegaicly to the child never born.

“Wanna Be A Vampire Too, Baby” gets a lighter, prettier musical treatment, but cutting through the mystery of what it’s telling is tough–it seems that in the aftermath, the previous song’s speaker feels at once haunted and watched-over, thinking of an afterlife where she joins that never-born baby.

This post was hard for me to write–something intended as just-this-side-of-jocular turned heartbreaking and confusing. Which actually gets at something I love about Helium’s work before they turned prog. There was this bizarre mix of fanciful, little-girl imagery and just the most pitch-black ruminations on women abused, feeling like whores, feeling dirty inside. It would be a women’s-study thesis if it weren’t so vividly, deeply felt, so forceful.

I use the word mystery above. As much as I feel that essentialism is a trap, I’m also reminded at times like this that there’s a well of sadness that, as a man, I can’t possibly know in this life.

Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock (U.S. CD with “Vampire”) at Newbury Comics.
Pirate Prude is out of print, but at the moment is gettable cheap via Amazon.