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| Pitchfork |
 In 1983, at age 16, Kristin Hersh was hit by a car. She landed on her head and lost a lot of blood. When she was recovering in the hospital she started, for the first time, to hear songs-- "sonic hauntings," as she called them in her 2010 memoir, Rat Girl. Initially humming, mechanical tones, they quickly organized themselves into the familiar grammar of guitar chords, drum beats, basslines, and surreal melodies. She didn't feel quite right until she got them out of her head: "As soon as I give a song a body in the real world, it stops playing and I breathe a sigh of relief, in precious silence." She played the chords herself and taught the other parts to her friends Dave Narcizo and Leslie Langston and her stepsister Tanya Donelly, and they became the earliest material recorded by their band, Throwing Muses.It's a hell of a creation myth, but an easy one to believe: pretty much every song Throwing Muses ever recorded sounds like an exorcism. Though indebted to punk's passion, fury, and occasional goofiness, the Muses were punks only in the spiritual sense of the word: Even by their teens, the original four were all accomplished musicians well-versed enough in music theory to create the weird, irregular chords and erratic time signatures that would become hallmarks of their sound. There was something almost Zen-like about the band's approach: Dump the contents of your busy brain out onto the street, and see what sounds they make on impact. The offspring of hippie idealism (Hersh grew up living on a commune and calling her dad "Dude") and post-punk disillusionment, the Muses' rhetoric was not about breaking the rules so much as transcending them completely. In a recent interview, Hersh said of her earliest days in the band, "I realized that in order to play with the voice you would have if you grew up on a desert island without a radio you need to forget rules." Anthology, the first retrospective collection of Throwing Muses material, comes to us on the 25th anniversary of their (first) self-titled record, a stammering, brutal masterpiece that managed to capture both late adolescent angst and feelings well beyond its years. Producer Gil Norton made Hersh's most intimate moments of near-delirium sound epic: like portions of someone's diary blown up to billboard size. Ever wary of commercial appeal, the band said it didn’t want to make anthems, so before its next record its label 4AD passed Norton onto the opening act on the Muses' European tour, fellow Bostonian scenesters Pixies, who were looking for someone to record their next album, Doolittle. Though the histories of the two bands are deeply, famously entwined, the Muses have enjoyed a fate harder to identify than the burden of being hugely influential (even though they were in certain corners: It's almost impossible to imagine the visceral bleats of singers like Corin Tucker or Marisa Paternoster without Kristin Hersh). This moment of reunions, reissues, and boundless nostalgia seems a good time to ask: where did Throwing Muses fit in?...full text |
| Bbc |
| In her memoir, Paradoxical Undressing, Throwing Muses lead singer and songwriter Kristin Hersh describes bands that are like candy, "fun and bad for you in a way that makes you feel good". Hers, by contrast, is "spinach, I guess. We’re ragged and bitter. But I swear to god, we’re good for you." Formed in Providence, Rhode Island in the early 1980s, Throwing Muses were first US band signed by 4AD. They were one of the most inventive bands of the late-80s boom in ‘college’ or ‘alternative’ rock – but those pigeonholes fail to convey anything of their concise, mercurial, hook-laden psychodramas. Given the band’s attitude towards conventional music business manoeuvres – somewhere between distrust and disgust – it’s no surprise that Anthology isn’t a traditional greatest hits album. Nearly all the band’s best known songs – Dizzy, Counting Backwards, Not Too Soon, Firepile – are absent, the tracklist representing personal favourites. Just one song features from their breakthrough album, 1991’s The Real Ramona. Dizzy’s absence is no surprise. The unrepresentatively goofy song, from the band’s least impressive album, 1990’s Hunkpapa, is their Shiny Happy People. As Anthology shows, this is a band at its best when marrying the associative tangle of Hersh’s often striking lyrics ("I sing about dead rabbits and blow jobs," in her self-deprecating analysis) to shifting time patterns, jangling dissonance, and sudden rays of melody. Hersh’s stepsister Tanya Donnelly, who left the band in 1991 to join the Breeders and later form Belly, wrote some great Throwing Muses songs, but their conventionality always sat awkwardly beside Hersh’s work....full text |
| Beggars |
| On the 25th anniversary of Throwing Muses debut album release, 4AD are issuing the first ever compilation of the bands work, simply entitled Anthology. Compiled by the band, the 21 track selection eschews most of the singles in favour of personal favourites, and enjoys a non-chronological sequence which makes for interesting juxtapositions and encourages a reassessment of the music. This very limited release comes in a hardback book with a bonus 22 track CD of B-sides and rarities Known for performing music with shifting tempos, creative chord progressions, unorthodox song structures, and surreal lyrics, Throwing Muses was set apart from other contemporary acts by Kristin Hersh’s stark, candid writing style, Tanya Donelly’s pop stylings and vocal harmonies, and David Narcizo’s unusual drumming techniques eschewing use of cymbals....full text |
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