Rebounding With Hooks
The Throwing Muses' Spiky Pop Hopalong
Listen to Tim Riley’s narration:
Hunkpapa, Throwing Muses (Sire Records, 1989)
Kristin Hersh tours Europe in September after celebrating a birthday on August 7. So I went back to where I first tried to make sense of what made her Rhode Island band so compelling, and so fragile. just as they crested into alt-rock prominence. Sleater Kinney soon dominated the hipster crowd, but Hunkpapa holds up like a jangly oddity that makes sense of many other records.
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 unmistakeable (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 (1988) was anything but user-friendly, indefensible even to longtime supporters of the band‘s rickrack smarts.
Her elusive song puzzles, spiked by Throwing Muses’ folk punk, can speak to you long before you understand what she’s on about.
On the new Hunkpapa, the Muses have refined their jigsaw ensemble work—abrupt tempo changes, 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, love as dirty but free, mother as unsoliciting hooker (“Making babies in the field/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 waveform.
Hersh’s bleating simmers down to a lithe wail, like a blonde Yoko Ono with more expressive ability, and her twilight-zone observations (“Nothing makes me older but the birthmark on your back”) meander in and about the time-warp arrangements and pique your attention just often enough to convince you she‘s answering questions you didn‘t know you were asking. The Muses frolic along the edges of asymmetry—if things were any more imbalanced, the center would slide out of sight.
from the Boston Phoenix, March 17, 1989
also
Oh joy, Hunkpapa doesn’t show up in Apple music, but several cuts show up on Live in Providence, and discogs.org lists a lot of titles in various formats.
Tanya Donelly made a sleeper with the Parkington Sisters during Covid, including covers of Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love,” Ray Davies’ “Days,” and Paul McCartney’s “Let Me Roll It.” We all know from “Let Me Roll It,” and its “Cold Turkey” echoes (scroll down to hear “Cold Turkey Roll”).
elsewhere
“The mood live was completely different. There was an angry edge the original recording didn’t have. We were all pissed off about losin’ a couple of people close to us and it came out,” Nils Lofgren in Neil Young’s biography, Shakey. He’s referring to a storied 35-minute outburst of “Tonight’s the Night” from 1973, closely detailed in this Recliner Notes post by Scott Bunn.
“That’s why the Sex Pistols gleefully proclaiming ‘No future for you!’ points a way forward, and why there is a rejection of anything less than utopia in ‘Eight Days a Week,’ with the Beatles saying that the joy and love they were singing about was so big that time itself would have to expand to encompass it,” Charles Taylor in Esquire on that McCartney book.
incoming
more on Springsteen with Joyce Millman, Steve Matteo on Beatles films, David Hepworth on the EMI studios we now call Abbey Road, and Mickey Guyton joins the Shania Twain tour…
playlist of the month
noises off
more links at the riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites
We’ve bounced over to Bluesky, now luring Kelly Willis over, Peter Hook too…
pinterest: the pix just keep on comin’
beacons.ai: in case you get lost
Nice one, Tim. Saw them Live at The Paradise in June of 1989. They played a bunch of Hunkpapa tunes--great gig.
Throwing Muses are the sort of group that you need to just jump into- not unlike being tossed into the deep end of a pool. Even waiting for them to become an acquired taste might prove too much. I first heard them when they opened up for New Order (labelmates make for strange bedfellows), and they promptly rearranged my mind. I'm not sure I've ever really stopped listening to Hunkpapa.