This Is a State of Shock

The record that rewired my brain

If you don’t want to subscribe but do want to read this essay, then you can do so here. It’s just 99p (about US$1.28), with no obligation to make further purchases.

I was eighteen when I first heard Throwing Muses (if indeed that’s what this enigmatic record is called — some will argue that title belongs to the band’s 2003 album Throwing Muses, and this, their debut, is actually untitled). Only a year or so younger than Kristin Hersh was when she recorded it, though by then she’d been in Throwing Muses for over four years and (though I didn’t know it then) had already been through enough shit to last most of us a lifetime.

By comparison I was a kid. Gay but closeted, a lonely only-child, I’d studied hard at school, done my A-levels like a good boy, got into University and was studying a subject (Physics) I was good at but fucking loathed, while all the time devouring fiction and trying to teach myself to play the guitar because I dreamed of being in a band (all crime writers are failed rock stars. You know that, right?) Kristin, by comparison, had grown up on a commune, taught herself to play guitar (inventing chords because the ones her father showed her were ‘boring’) formed a band with step-sister Tanya Donnelly and was touring clubs in which she was not yet legally allowed to drink and promoters saw her and her band as easy targets for exploitation.

It would suit the narrative of this essay to say hearing Throwing Muses (the record) was a pivotal moment for me, that it changed my life, instantly and forever. But, though it’s tempting to lie and say it was, that wouldn’t be true. Like many I suspect, the first time I heard Throwing Muses, my initial reaction was in fact, ‘What the fuck is this?’

It’s not an easy record, and had I not come to it gradually and via a roundabout route I’d have probably rejected it on first listen and retreated back to The Cure’s Disintegration and the quiet-loud-quiet of Pixies’ Doolittle. But I was lucky. I heard Throwing Muses’ Hunkpapa first, the band’s third album, which by comparison is easy listening. That record even features a single, pop song Dizzy, which (though not a cover) occupies the same ground as Björk’s ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’, in that it’s completely unrepresentative of the rest of an artist’s material (and even the album on which it’s featured), but does allow the uninitiated and unprepared listener a way in. So, via gateway drug Dizzy, I’d discovered the slightly more tricky Devil’s Roof, and from there it’d been a relatively small leap to Bea, Mania, Fall Down, Take and the rest.

(Others, I know, have come to Throwing Muses via other routes, often involving Tanya Donelly‘s songs. Hersh’s step-sister would usually write and sing one or two tracks on each album (an output which gradually increased over time and eventually necessitated her leaving Throwing Muses to be part of The Breeders and then form Belly), and though far from pop they tended to be a little more conventional, a little less twisted and gnarly, more palatable on first listen. But that wasn’t my route. For me the Tanya songs were always palate cleansers. Pleasant enough, but not really part of the meal).

So, having settled in with Hunkpapa, I found myself intrigued enough to delve into the back catalogue. Second album House Tornado proved difficult to find in either Our Price in Stourbridge or the record shops of Birmingham, but I was able to locate a vinyl copy of the debut.

It’s hard to explain what it was like hearing it for the first time, at least not without sounding like I hated it and am the worst person in the world to write this book. But the thing about this record is that it resists just about everything that would make it easy, and so the first listen especially is bewildering. The songs are not straightforward, they’re not quiet-loud-quiet, they’re not even verse-chorus-verse. A heady rush of arpeggiated guitars will suddenly collapse into a long outro with a different time signature and a new melody, a section that sounds like a different song in fact. (Fan-favourite Hate My Way is a good example of this. Just a minute in its driving, urgent, drum-heavy opening gives way suddenly to an elegiac section which, by the time we reach the three minute mark, has built to an almost unbearable intensity).

In a musical environment which rewards predictability (four bars for the intro, then a verse, then a chorus, then repeat before an eight bar bridge, another chorus, fade), it’s a disorientating anomaly. Kristin was making up her chords, don’t forget (often basing them on what colour the synaesthetic Hersh — she sees music as colour — was looking for), and has said in the past that her bassists have often struggled to determine the root note of whatever it was she was playing. Drummer Dave Narcizo largely eschewed cymbals, having learnt to play on a borrowed kit that came without any, and rather than playing traditional rock beats — which may have helped give the listener something familiar to latch on to — his playing was sparse and his style unpredictable.

Against this sonic, angular background, we have Hersh’s lyrics and vocal delivery. Resisting linear narrative, Hersh has said that she experiences the lyrics as percussive melodies, ‘Just one of the instruments (she hears) in (her) head when a song comes’ which she will often not even write down. And this is never more pronounced than on Throwing Muses, where her vocal delivery is as twisted and unpredictable as the music that churns beneath it, making her sound almost possessed by the spirit of the song. (In fact, with her warm, self-deprecating wit, Kristin has recently claimed that attendees at the early shows would comment that it was ‘so nice that they let the deaf girl sing’). And the lyrics? They too (perhaps unsurprisingly) resist easy analysis. The aforementioned Hate My Way features Hersh, sounding ravaged, yelling “My pillow screams too/But so does my kitchen/And water/And my shoes”, and Vicky’s Box contains the enigmatic lines “He won’t ride in cars anymore/It reminds him of blowjobs/And he’s a queer.”

So, no hits. No singles. Nothing that could be called catchy, at least on first listen (the hooks are there, I swear, but they’re buried, you have to go looking for them, and even when you find them they’re not conventional). No Dizzy, with its jolly singalong chorus about the mean ol’ Texas sun. No Not Too Soon (a single off their 1991 album The Real Ramona, the nearest Throwing Muses have ever had to a chart hit, and tellingly written by Tanya Donelly for what would be her last record with the band). Make no mistake, this

is a screwed up album, bratty and difficult, with lyrics that spit in your face and melodies that make you work for the reward.

And I fucking love it. Once I’d realised that it wasn’t going to come to me and lay its jewels at my feet — that I’d have to meet it half-way, at least — I was hooked. Perhaps because it was other, it was outside the mainstream, outside convention — not only the conventions of rock and pop but in some ways outside the conventions of music itself — and that’s how I felt, too. Other. Different. Like I didn’t know quite what I was, but I sure as hell knew what I wasn’t. And so, once I’d learnt its language, the record spoke to me. And I found I wasn’t alone.

Perhaps Hersh herself puts it best. ‘My band is...spinach, I guess. We're ragged and bitter. But I swear to god, we're good for you.’ She might just as well be talking about their debut.