Kristin Hersh is both charming and unsettling playing solo with acoustic guitar. Story songs which can lead down exuberant and challenging paths equally.
The tone is downbeat and morose it would appear, but sharp barbs and hooks abound.
We first heard her in 1981 in Indie Rock group Throwing Muses, formed in the after-blast of the Punk Big Boom. This let in a lot of arty, genre-bending types all coming under the umbrella of New Wave.
Groups like Raincoats and Public Image Ltd come to mind, which she has cited as influences. Later she also founded 50FootWave.
She is a Folkie at heart, and her solo work contains one album full of it, appropriately titled Murder, Misery and then Goodnight (1998). Not exactly Prince’s 1999.
The one traditional song of the evening is The Cuckoo. The origins lost in the mist of time, a haunting allegorical song which she gives a spine-tingling touch of malevolence to.
This tour is promoting her brand-new album Clear Pond Road, and a hefty number are covered. Someone commented to me that the atmosphere on it is slit your throat material.
That reminded me of the of the best one-line reviews of an album I have ever seen, Lester Bangs on the Otis Rush Cobra Recordings. It’s better than killing yourself!
As you keep listening, it opens and reveals itself. But the artist is not welcoming you in like a showman. She likes to creep out and unsettle.
This is Hersh all over, in the long haul of her career. Whilst she has been a Rock star of sorts, she has no interest in being a Rock Chick. She dedicates herself to the art form itself and sees music as a universal gift and a benediction for all.
In a spiritual sense she is following the ideology of If you have gifts, throw them into the pot. That means not to possess it yourself and surround it with an access for cash deal.
She kicks off the first half with Eyeshine, also the opening track on the new album. She has both a cute girly tone and a harsher whiskey and cigarette one. Think of Marianne Faithfull’s voice from As Tears Go By, to Broken English. Then chop off the extremes of both ends and you have it.
Mississippi Kite (from Crooked 2010) follows. She delivers in an incantatory style like a Beat Poet, and you do hear echoes of Nina Simone and Mississippi Goddam.
Flooding is slower, intense Folk.
She tells funny stories. Bywater, a Throwing Muses song, is the story of Freddie Mercury the goldfish. There’s an admonition not to flush him down the toilet.
Dandelion is stripped back spare and spectral Folk. She can do the thousand-yard scary stare on stage, still.
Mrs Haha is funny and eerie with Folk that gets manic. There is a Neil Young tone. Come back Mr Balls/ To the crab shack we go. May not know what it means but it makes me laugh.
Palmetto gets suitably weird. There is a long rambling monologue about cockroaches before she launches it with an arresting opening riff on the bass strings of her acoustic guitar. She has summoned up the surreal atmosphere of Franz Kafka and Metamorphosis.
She works in the same Beat Poet Hipster field of a Tom Waits or a Patti Smith. Musical tones on acoustic guitar can step around boundaries reminiscent of Harry Partch.
What’s all this about the green machines on her Gazebo Tree? In my rainy gazebo tree/ Bless my baby eyes/ Don’t you know Jesus died? There are many echoes to Patti Smith in her singing style.
Those lyrics sound like the early (and best) REM. Michael Stipe contributed to her first solo album.
Slippershell is the best and grungiest Throwing Muses cover of the night. Chrome/ Like phosphorescent teeth in mud-yellow skin/ You’re a slippershell. She can dial in on the wavelength of Captain Beefheart.
That goldfish may also have a trout mask.
City of the Dead, also from the Muses, is introduced with an explanation of her current home New Orleans. How the dead may rise from the ground because it is land under sea level.
It is Folk with blues elements and maybe a little Creole spice.
Taking the music as a whole, Kristin Hersh has a compelling take on Americana in its’ otherworldly weirdness. The same world as the David Lynch movies.
The show finishes on Bo Diddley Bridge. It is not the shave-and-haircut-two-bits rhythm and the bridge collapses at the end of the story.
We have been moved in mysterious ways.
Rev. Orange Peel
Photography by Leonie Moreland
