Kristin Hersh turned 60 on August 7, and tours Britain next month. This would have seemed way out of reach when her band, Throwing Muses, released Hunkpapa in 1989. The album has grown customary, but somehow still sounds natural and even beyond its years in retrospect, as if they had it in them all along. A recent listen confirmed this album as a keeper…
“Rebounding with Hooks,” Hunkpapa review, originally published in The Boston Phoenix on March 17, 1989)
A MOTHER AT 19, Kristin Hersh writes songs for Throwing Muses in the shorthand of someone forced to grow up fast. In her lyrics she yearns for the remainder of an adolescence cut short and for an adulthood that makes sense of working in a rock band. Her elusive song puzzles, spiked by Throwing Muses’ folk punk, can speak to you long before you understand what she’s on about. Besides the words, the chief difficulty is the songs’ odd shapes.
“Hate My Way,” the fear-inducing number about the encroaching awareness of evil and the centerpiece of the band’s 1986 debut, leaps from declamatory lurch to swelling ostinato as Hersh’s stringent whine slaps against thinly arpeggiated guitars, Leslie Langston’s sinuous bass, and David Narcizo’s brittle snare shots. Their unmistakable (if half-aloof) sound made the Newport quartet cult figures in England (where cult label 4AD first signed them). But since switching to Sire in 1986, the Muses have played hard to get with their audience, growing increasingly recondite. Last year’s galumphing House Tornado was anything but user friendly, indefensible even to longtime supporters of the band’s rickrack smarts.
The music here doesn’t ramble so much as coalesce in discrete, fragmented movements. Hunkpapa is a rebound record loaded with hooks, and damned if it doesn’t make House Tornado sound plausible in retrospect, a stray blip in a larger wave form…
On the new Hunkpapa, the Muses have refined their jigsaw ensemble work—abrupt tempo changes and Narcizo’s brickbat drumming—to the point that even the most lopsided beats begin to make sense. “I don’t speak I ramble,” Hersh confesses in “Bea,” a disturbing account of a muddied impregnation, of love as dirty but free, and of a mother as an unsolicited hooker (“Making babies in the field / Nothing makes me older”). The music here doesn’t ramble so much as coalesce in discrete, fragmented movements. Hunkpapa is a rebound record loaded with hooks, and damned if it doesn’t make House Tornado sound plausible in retrospect, a stray blip in a larger wave form.
Hersh’s bleating simmers down to a lithe wail, like a blonde Yoko Ono with more expressive ability, and her un-calculated twilight-zone observations (“Nothing makes me older but the birthmark on your back”) meander in and [out of] TV consumerism with images of menstruation; “The Burrow” injects cool vocal triads amid two part verses (with only a single word change) of water-induced drunkenness. Only “Mania,” a hallucinatory squabble, and the closing “Take,” which adds spare horns, come off as indigestible nonentities. The surrounding riddles on Hunkpapa (talk about a wish-fantasy title) float Hersh’s oblique mother/band-hood perplexities atop sonorities the rest of us can call pop with a straight face.
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Sugar on Blackstone, the new solo album, comes out September 18th on Fire Records. Advance track “Moths,” available now.
Kristin Hersh: forthcoming solo Dates in Ireland and UK
noises off
From the Archives: Lose Some Sleep and Say You Tried: Hoisting my young critical faculties up for an 1988 Boston Phoenix review of Joy Division’s landmark compilation Substance… Yo La Tengo’s Textbook Snoot: How 1990’s Fakebook mapped a beautiful, private history of buried tracks, tracing Yo La Tengo’s uncanny knack for reclaiming forgotten classics… Don’t Tell A Soul: Replacements Dress Down: A look back at the pivot-point summer of 1989, where a Cold War fizzle tainted Tom Petty’s softcore Full Moon Fever era and saw the Replacements dressing down their brilliant punk-rock instincts for the mainstream…
Coming soon: Michael Sokil compares Ringo’s drumming to Paul’s; David Thomson feels like movies have tricked him…
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