Every local musician who was gigging in the early-to-mid '90s likes to reminisce about the local scene's last real Golden Age, when eclectic all-original bills would regularly fill Tampa and St. Pete's biggest clubs, and every show was suffused with a sense of camaraderie that hasn't felt as thick since. Helium Bomb was arguably the most exciting and original Bay area rock band going at that time (though a strong case could also be made for The Psychles, God bless 'em), an eccentric yet compelling four-piece that eschewed standard arrangements and hooks in favor of ocean-size dynamic shifts and mesmerizing stage presence. When the band regrouped in town last September after a relocation to Chicago and a subsequent breakup, many of us who'd seen them in their heyday were looking forward to showing a new generation of local fans exactly what the hell we were failing so miserably to accurately describe. And at their first post-reunion show at an absolutely packed New World Brewery, Helium Bomb didn't disappoint. While the band didn't play a single note of its old catalog all night, the style, power and sense of aural theater remained intact through a set of solidly compelling new tunes, transporting an old school back to a time of careless couch-crashing, seven-night-a-week club carousing and unlimited community support while blowing a new school's collective mind and sounding as uncompromisingly original in 2002 as it did in 1993. Helium Bomb played a few more sparsely attended gigs before packing it in for good earlier this year, but that New World set provided a much needed reminder of what our scene was, is and can be.
This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 1, 2003.