Posts Tagged ‘ helmet ’

Helmet: February 21, 2015 Bowery Ballroom – FLAC/MP3/Streaming Songs

February 26, 2015
By

Helmet-5
[Photos from the February 18th show courtesy of Brian Reilly for Bowery Presents]

It was a few decades ago that a friend of mine happened to spin Helmet’s landmark ‘Betty‘ album for me and set the hook for my enthusiasm for this band.  Now touring to honor the 20th anniversary of this record, these dates include a front-to-back playing of it as well as a second set drawing from their vast catalog of songs.  In a day and age where a number of bands are doing this, the kicker is that ‘Betty‘ is an amazing album and easily made it onto my personal list of “desert island discs” some time ago.  The second of three very sold-out NYC area shows (the recording from the Saint Vitus gig is HERE) found Helmet firing on all cylinders.  Frontman Page Hamilton has surrounded himself with a roster of superb musicians (drummer Kyle Stevenson, guitarist Dan Beeman and bassist Dave Case) and these concerts showcased a very well rehearsed and tight group that obviously have the chops to play anything you can throw at them.  In addition to fielding a few crowd requests, Helmet dug out some deep cuts including “Impressionable”, “Repetition” and fan-favorite, “Sinatra”.  In a nutshell, they sounded fantastic and more than lived up to the legacy of this material.

With Helmet’s soundman, Rubes, at the board with assistance from Bowery Ballroom’s FOH, Kenny, the venue’s sound on this night was, as we’ve come to expect, great.  Combining our microphones with the soundboard feed that Page asked us to use, our recording is excellent.  We hope you like what you hear as much as we did.  Enjoy!

Special thanks to Helmet, Brian and Chad at Maine Road, and Kieran and the staff at Bowery Ballroom for making this recording possible and for their courtesy and cooperation.

Stream “Rollo”:

Stream “Give It”:

Direct download of the complete show in MP3 [HERE]
Direct download of the complete show in FLAC [HERE]

If any of the links are no longer working, email nyctaper with a request for the download location of the files.

Follow Johnny Fried Chicken Boy on Twitter

Note: All of the material on this site is offered with artist permission, free to fans, at our expense.  The only thing we ask is that you download the material directly from this site, rather than re-posting the direct links or the files on other sites without our permission.  Please respect our request.

Helmet-7

Helmet
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Bowery Ballroom
New York, NY, USA

Source: Milab VM-44 Links (cardioid) + SBD > Edirol R-44 (WAV @ 24-bit/48kHz)
Lineage: R-44 > PC > Adobe Audition (mixdown, downsample, dither, tracking) > WAV (16-bit/44.1kHz) > TLH (check/fix SBEs, FLAC conversion) > FLAC (level 8)
Recorded and produced by: Johnny Fried Chicken Boy

SETLIST:
[Total time: 1:40:20]
01. Wilma’s Rainbow
02. I Know
03. Biscuits for Smut
04. Milquetoast
05. Tic
06. Rollo
07. Street Crab
08. Clean
09. Vaccination
10. Beautiful Love
11. Speechless
12. The Silver Hawaiian
13. Overrated
14. Sam Hell
15. [band intros / banter1]
16. (High) Visibility
17. Role Model
18. FBLA II
19. [banter2]
20. Welcome To Algiers
21. Birth Defect
22. Broadcast Emotion
23. Unsung
24. [banter3]
25. White City
26. Impressionable
27. [banter4]
28. Give It
29. [encore break / Sinatra intro]
30. Sinatra
31. [banter5]
32. Repetition
33. In the Meantime

If you download this recording, we expect that you will PLEASE SUPPORT Helmet, visit their website and Facebook page, and purchase their official releases and merchandise [HERE] at Amazon, iTunes, or your favorite record store or retailer.  And definitely go see Helmet live.

Helmet: February 22, 2015 Saint Vitus – Flac/MP3/Streaming

February 25, 2015
By

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[photos courtesy of unartignyc – his excellent video below]

Helmet is taking a look back this tour and celebrating the 20th anniversary of their seminal album Betty beginning each show by playing the album straight through. On Sunday night the band added a special wrinkle by playing a small club the size of which they haven’t played in years. As Page Hamilton noted at the first break in the action, the “first Helmet show ever” was played at a club very similar in style, location and size to Saint Vitus — the late great Lauterbach’s in Brooklyn. For a time in the 80s and 90s, Lauterbach’s was the place for punk, hardcore and metal in the “outer boroughs”. And out it was, all the way in the South Slope on Prospect Avenue. And like the long gone venue, Helmet themselves are a product of that era in Brooklyn. As the band’s founder and only remaining original member Hamilton was a known quantity in music circles when Helmet formed in 1989, but there was a period when places like Lauterbach’s were their venues of choice. Helmet would go on to play a vast arragy of huge venues in the 1990s. While Saint Vitus in 2015 is an established and well-respected home for heavy music, its nice to see that Page has a sense of history — respect enough for the band’s legion of fans — to return to his roots and come “full circle” as he described. For this set, Helmet ripped through Betty in forty-five minutes staying pretty close to the album’s sound. The final half of the show has varied throughout this tour and on Sunday we got some rare oldies and of course the hits. I was particularly impressed with the raging extended version of “Driving Nowhere” which gave Page a chance to stretch out and display his guitar chops. We are streaming that track below. The Betty tour continues in the US and Canada through the end of March, dates here.

I recorded this set with the Schoeps mounted in front of the soundboard and mixed with a feed that Page earlier in the week had encouraged us to use. The sound quality is superb. Enjoy!

We also recorded the Bowery Ballroom show on Saturday and that will be coming very soon.

Download the Complete show [MP3] / [FLAC]

Stream “Driving Nowhere”:

Stream “Biscuits for Smut”:

Note: All of the material on this site is offered with artist permission, free to fans, at our expense. The only thing we ask is that you download the material directly from this site, rather than re-posting the direct links or the files on other sites without our permission. Please respect our request, and feel free to repost the Soundcloud links

Helmet
2015-02-22
Saint Vitus
Brooklyn NY

Digital Master Recording
Soundboard + Audience Matrix

Soundboard + Schoeps CCM4u Cardioids > Sound Devices 744t > 2 x 24bit 48kHz wavs > Soundforge (mixing) > CDWave 1.95 (tracking) > TLH > flac (320 MP3/tagging via Foobar)

Recorded and Produced by nyctaper

Setlist:
[Total Time 1:39:49]
01 Wilma’s Rainbow
02 I Know
03 Biscuits for Smut
04 [banter Lauterbach’s]
05 Milquetoast
06 Tic
07 Rollo
08 Street Crab
09 Clean
10 Vaccination
11 Beautiful Love
12 Speechless
13 The Silver Hawaiian
14 Overrated
15 Sam Hell
16 [intros – Pariah story]
17 It’s Easy To Get Bored
18 So Long
19 Renovation
20 [banter – the ghost]
21 You Borrowed
22 Diet Aftertaste
23 Bad Mood
24 Driving Nowhere
25 [banter – bass player]
26 FBLA
27 Unsung
28 On Your Way Down
29 [encore break]
30 Iron Head
31 In the Meantime

If you download this recording from NYCTaper, we expect that you will PLEASE SUPPORT Helmet, visit their website, and purchase their official releases, including Betty, directly from their web store [HERE] or from your favorite online retailer.

Helmet: August 2, 2012 Webster Hall – FLAC / MP3 / Streaming

August 9, 2012
By


[Photos by acidjack]

Our younger readers are fortunate not to remember the Columbia House Music Club, which promised eight to ten CDs for 1 cent in exchange for signing up for a “club” that would mail you a (usually lame) CD-of-the-month at an exorbitant price, unless you mailed it back first. The club bore more than its fair share of customer complaints, and its selection was weak. But if you were a kid and didn’t have a lot of cash or access to good music stores (and you were diligent about declining that CD of the month), it wasn’t a bad way to get ahold of new music in the pre-Internet era.  One thing I can thank Columbia House for is introducing me to Helmet and their standout albums Meantime and Betty, each still a tour de force of hardcore-influenced rock twenty years on.

Frontman Page Hamilton has moved on from his former bandmates, and is the only original member of the lineup, but as Johnny Fried Chicken Boy observed last October, Hamilton and his new cast of characters can still very much bring the heat. Hurtling through a Webster Hall set that included five songs from the band’s 2010 record Seeing Eye Dog (plus another from 2004’s Size Matters) with a fairly even blend of songs from their four 90s albums, Strap It On, Meantime, Betty and Aftertaste. One feature that always set Helmet apart from many hardcore and metal bands of the era was their more intelligent approach to their music, both in terms of Hamilton’s classically-informed playing and their eschewing of the macho heavy metal aesthetic of contemporaries like Pantera. Hamilton, who relocated from New York to LA at the end of the 90s, remains a gifted frontman, and songs like two of my favorites, “In the Meantime” and “Wilma’s Rainbow” were delivered with ferocity. Although this set clocked in at barely over an hour thanks to Webster’s curfew and the fact that this was a co-headlining tour with Toadies, Hamilton and the band packed in sixteen songs, and stirred up a mosh pit in the process (kind of a feat when you consider how early it was in the night, and the age of many of the fans).

Johnny Fried Chicken Boy recorded this set with four microphones in our usual balcony location. I ended up using the Schoeps MK41 source alone for this post, as both sources were a bit “muddy” in the low-mid bass region, and combining them would only have accentuated that flaw.  After some time spent editing, although this is not my favorite of my recordings quality-wise, this recording should be a very good listen, if not quite up to the standard of Johnny’s Bowery Ballroom recording linked above.  Enjoy!

Stream “In the Meantime”
[audio:http://www.nyctaper.com/H1110Helmet1120/19 In the Meantime.mp3]

Stream “Wilma’s Rainbow”
[audio:http://www.nyctaper.com/H1110Helmet1120/08 Wilma’s Rainbow.mp3]

Direct download of MP3 files [HERE] |  Direct Download of the FLAC files [HERE]

Follow acidjack on Twitter

Note: All of the material on this site is offered with artist permission, free to fans, at our expense. The only thing we ask is that you download the material directly from this site, rather than re-posting the direct links or the files on other sites without our permission. Please respect our request.

Helmet
2012-08-02
Webster Hall
New York, NY USA

Exclusive download hosted at nyctaper.com
Recorded and produced by acidjack and Johnny Fried Chicken Boy

Schoeps MK41 (DFC, BOB, DINa)>KC5>CMC6>Sound Devices USBPre2>Edirol R-44 [OCM]>2x24bit/48kHz WAV>Izotope Ozone 5 (EQ)>Audition CS 5.5 (parallel compression)>Audacity (set fades, tracking, amplify, balance, downsample)>FLAC ( level 8 )

Tracks [Total Time 1:04:55]
01 Sinatra
02 So Long
03 Welcome To Algiers
04 Renovation
05 Exactly What You Wanted
06 White City
07 Bad Mood
08 Wilma’s Rainbow
09 [banter]
10 Miserable
11 Blacktop
12 Overrated
13 In Person
14 [banter]
15 Smart
16 Ironhead
17 Milquetoast
18 [short encore break]
19 In the Meantime

If you download this recording, we expect that you will PLEASE SUPPORT Helmet, visit theirwebsite, visit their Facebook and MySpace pages, and purchase their official releases (including their most recent album, Seeing Eye Dog) and merchandise [HERE].

Helmet: October 11, 2011 Bowery Ballroom – FLAC and MP3 Downloads + Streaming Songs

November 16, 2011
By


[Photos courtesy of Dana (distortion) Yavin.  See more of her excellent work HERE.]

I can remember the first time I heard Helmet’s disc, ‘Meantime‘, which has since become the standard bearer for alternative metal.  Aggressive songs that held riffs hitting like a sledge hammer, frontman Page Hamilton (trained as a jazz guitarist and sole original member) threw the musical rulebook out the window and led a troupe of expert musicians who obviously had serious chops.  Having grown up on a steady diet of hard rock and heavy metal, I was instantly hooked.  The times I saw them play live before their breakup in 1998 were no less riveting.  And hearing of the band’s reformation in 2004 was very welcome news.  Having been well over a decade since I had last gone to one of their concerts, I jumped on tickets when I heard they would be coming through on their current tour.  I was further thrilled when they gave me the greenlight to record the show.  With cuts spanning the group’s career and from nearly all of their albums, particularly the recent, ‘Seeing Eye Dog‘, Helmet played quite a few favorites and a monstrous version of “Turned Out”.  Judging by his interaction with the crowd, Page seemed to be having a hell of a good time and very excited to be back in the band’s original hometown of NYC.  And he wasn’t the only one: I’m happy to report that the music I heard that night sounds just as good and tight as the tracks that put a smile on my face nearly 20 years ago.

We recorded this show with a four-microphone rig from our usual spot in the balcony.  Combining the always great sound of Bowery Ballroom and the impressive skills of the sound engineer and the result is an excellent recording.  We hope you like what you hear as much as we did and PLAY IT LOUD!!

Stream “She’s Lost”: [audio:http://www.nyctaper.com/H1110Helmet1120/Helmet_-_She’s_Lost.mp3]

Stream “Ironhead”: [audio:http://www.nyctaper.com/H1110Helmet1120/Helmet_-_Ironhead.mp3]

Direct download of the complete show in MP3 [HERE]

Download the Complete show in FLAC [HERE].

Note: All of the material on this site is offered with artist permission, free to fans, at our expense.  The only thing we ask is that you download the material directly from this site, rather than re-posting the direct links or the files on other sites without our permission.  Please respect our request.

Helmet
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Bowery Ballroom
New York, NY, USA

Source: AUD > AKG C 414 B-XLS’s + DPA 4021’s > Edirol R-44 (WAV @ 24-bit/48kHz)
Lineage: R-44 > USB > PC > Adobe Audition (mixdown, adjust levels, downsample, dither, tracking) > WAV (16-bit/44.1kHz) > Trader’s Little Helper (check/fix SBE’s, FLAC) > FLAC Level 8
Recorded and produced by: Johnny Fried Chicken Boy

SETLIST:
[Total time: 1:16:21]
01. Wilma’s Rainbow
02. So Long
03. Renovation
04. Welcome to Algiers
05. Give It
06. In Person
07. banter
08. White City
09. Harmless
10. Smart
11. banter / band intro
12. Crisis King
13. She’s Lost
14. Blacktop
15. Tic
16. encore break / banter
17. Ironhead
18. banter
19. Turned Out
20. Milquetoast

If you download this recording, we expect that you will PLEASE SUPPORT Helmet, visit their website, visit their Facebook and MySpace pages, and purchase their official releases (including their most recent album, Seeing Eye Dog) and merchandise [HERE].

SUPPORT NYCTaper




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