Twilight Sad Discogs

[Magdalen Tibor]

KristinHersh 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.

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.

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\u2019 folk punk, can speak to you long before you understand what she\u2019s on about. Besides the words, the chief difficulty is the songs\u2019 odd shapes.

\u201CHate My Way,\u201D the fear-inducing number about the encroaching awareness of evil and the centerpiece of the band\u2019s 1986 debut, leaps from declamatory lurch to swelling ostinato as Hersh\u2019s stringent whine slaps against thinly arpeggiated guitars, Leslie Langston\u2018s sinuous bass, and David Narcizo\u2019s 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\u2018s galumphing House Tornado (1988) was anything but user-friendly, indefensible even to longtime supporters of the band\u2018s rickrack smarts.

On the new Hunkpapa, the Muses have refined their jigsaw ensemble work\u2014abrupt tempo changes, Narcizo\u2019s brickbat drumming\u2014to the point that even the most lopsided beats begin to make sense. \u201CI don\u2018t speak I ramble,\u201D Hersh confesses in \u201CBea,\u201D a disturbing account of a muddied impregnation, love as dirty but free, mother as unsoliciting hooker (\u201CMaking babies in the field/Makes me older\u201D). The music here doesn\u2018t ramble so much as coalesce in discrete, fragmented movements. Hunkpapa is a rebound record loaded with hooks, and damned if it doesn\u2018t make House Tornado sound plausible in retrospect, a stray blip in a larger waveform.

Hersh\u2019s bleating simmers down to a lithe wail, like a blonde Yoko Ono with more expressive ability, and her twilight-zone observations (\u201CNothing makes me older but the birthmark on your back\u201D) meander in and about the time-warp arrangements and pique your attention just often enough to convince you she\u2018s answering questions you didn\u2018t know you were asking. The Muses frolic along the edges of asymmetry\u2014if things were any more imbalanced, the center would slide out of sight.

\u201CThe mood live was completely different. There was an angry edge the original recording didn\u2019t have. We were all pissed off about losin\u2019 a couple of people close to us and it came out,\u201D Nils Lofgren in Neil Young\u2019s biography, Shakey. He\u2019s referring to a storied 35-minute outburst of \u201CTonight\u2019s the Night\u201D from 1973, closely detailed in this Recliner Notes post by Scott Bunn.

\u201CThat\u2019s why the Sex Pistols gleefully proclaiming \u2018No future for you!\u2019 points a way forward, and why there is a rejection of anything less than utopia in \u2018Eight Days a Week,\u2019 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,\u201D Charles Taylor in Esquire on that McCartney book.

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