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MUSIC REVIEW
August 31, 1999
Kristin Hersh: Surreal Visions From a Poet of Terror and Revelation
By ANN POWERS
Salutes flew toward Kristin Hersh on Friday, during the second of
three solo shows she played last week at the Knitting Factory.
Audience members hooted the moment the singer and guitarist picked
the first chord of their favorite songs. As befits an artist
intensely beloved by a discerning few, however, the praise came in
small doses -- one or two voices greeting personal favorites.
Ms. Hersh smiled graciously, if skeptically, at the response. "You
didn't buy that album!" she insisted when the inevitable lone cheer
arose for a song from 1998's "Strange Angels" (Rykodisc). "Nobody
bought that album. Are you related to me?"
Whoever hollered may indeed feel that intimate with 33-year-old Ms.
Hersh, because of her harrowingly immediate songs. Since founding
the now-defunct Throwing Muses as a teen-ager in the early 1980's,
Ms. Hersh has developed a visceral style that often hits a rawer
nerve than even the hardest rock.
Her plastic, sometimes obsessively circular song structures
emphasize staggered rhythms and extreme dynamic shifts, and her
voice, a carnal cry that pushes through her body gathering up air,
lends her often oblique lyrics an oracular veneer. Although her
excellent new album, "Sky Motel" (4AD), shows her sauntering toward
accessibility, Ms. Hersh remains a poet of the internal organs,
including the gray matter inside a skull that can feel as if it
might explode.
"That woman literally feels like she's got a hook in her head," Ms.
Hersh sang in one of many older selections that showed the
evolution of her work from primal spewing to carefully structured
but still-surreal visions. She worked through her catalogue,
including notable obscurities like the harlot's lament, "Bea," and
"Hysterical Bending," a body-wrenching ballad she recorded for the
1994 abortion rights benefit album "Just Say Roe."
"I've been accused of writing about childbirth many times, but I
think that song is the only one I have written about it," said Ms.
Hersh, who has three sons. "I just realized it a couple days ago.
That makes it deep!"
Such jovial between-song patter exemplified Ms. Hersh's appeal.
Although she writes nearly dissonant music, filling her verses with
gory images and declarations of inner turmoil, she never resorts to
the gothic clichés of most doom rockers. Over the last five years
she has been recording Appalachian folk songs along with her own
material, and her acoustic guitar playing revealed her affinity for
those homey murder ballads and religious prophecies.
Like the lost mountain bards she admires, Ms. Hersh recognizes
terror and revelation as common human experiences. Her openness to
those hazardous perceptions is the essence of her lasting gift.
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