The voice is the first touchstone, a roughened alto that curls like a cat into a song’s corners, purring sometimes, hissing and spitting in others. Kristen Hersh coos and yowls in a way that is harsh but also sweet, and the sound of her voice has been a constant across a decades long career. It’s the way in, but also a metaphor for the rest of her aesthetic, which is bracing and unsentimental but also full of warm welcome. It’s a concoction of strident, string-straining guitar strums, jubiliant rhythms and the grounding thump of bass. Here on her 11th album as Throwing Muses, Hersh is reassuringly familiar, but not afraid to take risks.
Kristen Hersh makes records under multiple guises, as a solo artist and with her loudest, rowdiest project 50 Foot Wave. But Throwing Muses is her first and longest running project, begun at the dawn of the 1980s with her half-sister and Belly proprietor Tanya Donnelly and continued sporadically, and largely without Donnelly, ever since. Like many musicians of her era, Hersh had a brush with major label success and recoiled from it, learning, over time, to make music to please herself. For Moonlight Concessions, the burr-voiced singer reconvenes a well-worn-in ensemble, David Narcizo her drummer since the get go and bassist Bernard George who’s been with her since 1995’s University. To this she adds a transforming element, Pete Harvey on cello, who is new to the band but an essential player. He saws away with rhythmic abandon on “Libretto” and coaxes the long, emotion-riddled throbs on more tranquil “Theremini.”
These cuts aren’t as blaring as the ones Hersh saves for 50 Foot Wave, but they’re not exactly campfire songs either. “South Coast” bristles with percussive energy, the guitar crashing through the mix and a tambourine jangling with euphoric transport. “Life is so damn long,” Hersh snarls with both toughness and heart, celebrating survival and resilience with a sideways grin.
The songs where Harvey shines are among the album’s best. “Theremini” drifts dreamily, Hersh just over a whisper in cryptic verses about tequila and mercy and the absence of rules, but there’s weight in the searching, keening strains of cello. It reminds you that Hersh has always collaborated happily with chamber orchestra instruments, going back at least to the gorgeous “Your Ghost” from the Hips and Makers album. But Harvey’s cello can also take on more aggressive coloring, as in the twitchy, propulsive (but still acoustic) “Libretto.” Here is stirs up the music from the bottom, coloring it with whorls of silty earthiness as Hersh’s guitar and voice dance on top.
This isn’t an in-your-face grabber of an album. Indeed while I liked it immediately, it took a long time to settle on favorite tracks; there are no obvious bangers. Still settle in, and it’s like having coffee with an old friend, familiar but occasionally surprising, kind but full of raucous humor and very, very real.
Throwing Muses. Poster announcing the band's live dates for 2025 so far, to promote the album Moonlight Concessions (Fire Records) which is to be released tomorrow.
