A "best of" Helmet album is about as essential as the Director's Cut Extended Edition DVD of Look Who's Talking Too, but in many ways it's even sadder. Helmet were, next to Mudhoney, the band whose failure to attain popularity was most perplexing during the 1990s. But like that Seattle band, Helmet paved the way for the stop-start hard rock that dominated the airwaves (in watered-down form) for the last 10 years.

The question is, why put this collection of "hits" out? Anyone who likes or cares about Helmet in the slightest already owns Meantime and Betty, and aside from exposing 14 year olds to some tracks from Strap it On (which is a bit hard to find, but not impossible) this album has little to offer. As a sampler, it is thorough (even tossing in a few completely useless cuts from their christ-rapingly awful postBetty offerings) and highlights their finest moments. "FBLA" rocks as though John Stanier could blast a hole in the wall with a rimshot and is about to do it, and "Sinatra" is the perfect example of the promise they had but left largely unfulfilled. Understandably light on cuts from their major-label debut (but including the crucial hits "Ironhead" and "Unsung"), this compilation spends unnecessary amounts of time covering the Betty and post-Betty period. If you want to hear that album, which I recommend highly, it will cost you all of $1.99 at any used CD store in America. Pick up a copy of No Alternative while you're there.

A music reviewer much more talented than I once said that not many people listened to the Pixies, comparatively, but everyone who did eventually started a band. I can't more succinctly summarize Helmet's odd history. They never fully explored the depth and variety that songs like "Sinatra" hinted at, but none of their contemporaries can match their ability to batter the public into submission with precision-powered straight rock. If Led Zeppelin was the Hammer of the Gods, Helmet was the scalpel.

Ed