When
Throwing Muses’ leader Kristin Hersh started writing songs and formed a
band at the age of 14, she was not your average suburban teenager penning
ditties about boys and fantasizing about how cool it would be to be famous.
Her creative ideas came in the form of hallucinations, images she thought
were real - “I couldn’t see the difference between a song-image and something
just coming out my wall.” Hersh, who’d already been playing guitar for
years, started to express these visions in song form, and in them found
the source of the stunning musical gift that ultimately made Throwing Muses
one of the most influential bands of the decade.
In
the mid 1980s, the Muses left their Rhode Island hometown to play the Boston
club circuit. Hersh, at 19, was a visual study...as strangely compelling
as her music - a baby faced kid with a guitar slung across the swell of
her pregnant belly. She sang like a child wracked by nightmares, alternating
suddenly between fragile melodies and savage outbursts of frustration and
pain. Throwing Muses’ unconventional musical style - a jarring tumult of
waltz-time guitars and eccentric backbeats with no basis in traditional
verse-chorus pop song structures soon made the band an underground sensation.
Although
the turbulent, troubled nature of their music inevitably attracted legions
of obsessive fans who plagued the band with accounts of their own dark
demons, Throwing Muses never set out to be the standard bearers for teen
angst. Their musical approach was founded in innocence - they played what
they heard.
We
had a lot of faith in what we were doing, so we just assumed it would be
accepted for being good,” says drummer David Narcizo. “It was a naive
kind of cockiness. We had no sense of business or money or image, just
a sense that everyone was going to be so happy to hear this.”
Throwing
Muses had the savvy to realize that an American major label wouldn’t know
how to begin promoting a band for whom there was no commercial precedent.
In 1986, Throwing Muses became the first American band to sign a deal with
the powerful UK independent label 4AD, a match that was weird enough in
many ways, but proved to be the right choice. “We didn’t have anything
in common with all those dark English bands (that defined the 4AD sound
at the time). We were completely out of context,” says Hersh. “We
were playing country hardcore, basically, but I guess they thought it sounded
scary enough, like a really scary country band.”
Throwing
Muses self-titled 4AD debut landed them on the covers of such major British
magazines as NME and Melody Maker, and made them superstars in Europe.
As an import, it secured their status as underground icons at home, which
inspired more respectful overtures from the American majors. They signed
up with Sire Records in 1987 and released a series of albums that were
each distinguished by their own individual moods and merits, but maintained
the unparalleled honesty and originality of the Throwing Muses sound.
Although
the band sustained a few line-up changes (bassist Leslie Langston left
the Muses to get married in 1990; Hersh’s stepsister Tanya Donnelly struck
out on her own to form BELLY in 1991), Throwing Muses have managed to remain
in favor with both the fickle British music press and with their core following
of impassioned American fans. Kristin Hersh, now the 28-year-old mother
of two young boys and a seasoned major label artist, has never lost her
ability to hear her inspirations as tangible entities. The demons
in her head didn’t kill her, they made her stronger. Her voice has matured
to something more sublimely beautiful than the crazed vocal acrobatics
of her earliest work; her simple, astonishingly powerful poetic style is
more oddly perceptive and moving than ever.
UNIVERSITY
is the kind of record that could extend Throwing Muses’ US audience far
beyond it’s cult following. If the churning galloping rhythms of earlier
Muses albums were somewhat childlike in their unfettered exuberance, the
sinewy grooves of UNIVERSITY suggest a more grown-up, powerful sexuality.
Throwing Muses, which now consists of Hersh, founding drummer Narcizo and
bassist Bernard Georges (who was won over by the band’s sound while in
their employ as tour roadie), has found musical muscle in the rock-trio
format. “It’s amazing to me that a trio is so strong, like a triangle,”
says Hersh. “There’s all this understood music in every measure - silence
plays a role, every fading note plays a role. There’s all this space,
and you can raise the energy level at any given time.”
The
rhythms of UNIVERSITY are decidedly “female” - a term Hersh uses when referring
to a gender approach to song patterns.
“The
form that’s accepted as the pop music that’s usually played on the radio
is very masculine. It’s predictable,” says Hersh. “There’s a hook that
repeats and a build to a climax...It’s like every play, every TV show.
This ‘feminine’ approach doesn’t rely so heavily on building power by going
up in a straight line - it goes all over the place, with lots of details.
It’s not more appropriate to the human condition or anything, it’s just
a little more necessary now that we’ve leaned so much in one direction
for so long.”
Significantly,
UNIVERSITY is the first Throwing Muses album produced solely by the band,
AND... they’ve proven that nobody knows better what to do with their music
than they do.
The
direct impact of the songs has a lot to do with a dry production technique
that brings every tone into sharp relief. There’s a sense of reinvented,
groovy psychedelia throughout the record that recalls a mid-1960s mood
without taking on a retro feel. The first single “Bright Yellow Gun” is
an infectious rocker; “Shimmer” springs from a driving backbeat and never
lets up. The most remarkable thing about UNIVERSITY is that almost any
track could be the hit single. “Snakeface” is as hypnotically seductive
as a snake dance, and the haunted lullaby melodies of “Crabtown” are hard
to get out of your head; the shimmering “That’s All You Wanted,” is unflinchingly
pretty and vulnerable. There’s no question that UNIVERSITY is Throwing
Muses most accessible record to date, however, it’s as multi-dimensional
as the most complicated Muses opus; the songs wrap around you, get under
your skin, and become progressively more intriguing as they reveal themselves,
layer by layer.
