Throwing Muses At Purgatory/Paradise

When Kristin Hersh released Crooked three years ago, it set the tone for her next chapter. It has been brisk and productive, with a steady stream of art flowing outward from what she calls her funny-looking, intense and necessary planet of music.

Her continuous creative bursts have become a massive collection of tracks that she has quietly assembled to make the first Throwing Muses album in a decade. Except, it wasn't really quiet.

Hersh has been sharing bits, pieces, demos, and works in progress for weeks and months and years. At times there didn't even seem to be an end in sight — so much so that the first Throwing Muses album in a decade was something she sometimes called Precious/Pretentious behind the scenes.

The name could have been perfect for the release too, but she settled on something more mysterious. Purgatory/Paradise is named after an intersection in Rhode Island. Specifically, it's a bend that takes westbound drivers north past Purgatory Chasm. It's quiet there, a few hundred feet before an ocean front.

Purgatory/Paradise is an impressive collection of intensely intimate music.

The 32-track album plays very much like the area around its namesake. There are soft and intimate discoveries, roaring songs with big surfy crashes, craggy cliffs that invite you to jump, and great big slides that ride along with big swelling waves. All of it strikes a nerve as one of this year's best.

With only a few songs ever passing the three-minute mark, Hersh delivers an all-organic outing that has a physical presence with colors and textures that spins around and sends heads reeling. Some of the most striking standalone tracks include the psychedelically tuned Morning Birds 1, drug-induced surrender of Opiates, and the riveting self-acceptance of Slippershell.

Sunray Venus is a shell, which is the place she and the band retreat to after every world tour. As always, she jokes that her music takes on it a life of its own. It frequently leaves her out of it.


What she isn't left out of it how Purgatory/Paradise is presented. While the album or portions of it can be downloaded, Hersh feels strongly that music was never meant to be compressed on a compact disc. There is so much more to it, something she has framed with essays, photographs, and artwork from her and bandmate Dave Narcizo.

It's very similar to what she set the stage with in producing Crooked but then immediately takes her work past several rungs to an impossible next level. In fact, the 64 pages aren't distilled into whatever could fit between the hardcover. Instead, it swells with instruction for more downloads: exclusive content, demos, and outtakes.

Like all of her work, it's largely funded by fans that range from Strange Angels ($30 per quarter) to Executive Producers (who even receive executive producer credit on her next CD). But that in itself becomes the part of the beauty of her work. Hersh has pioneered the way to make music, minimizing the business aspect and maximizing the art.

The results are arresting. Some tracks are nothing more than teases, interludes, and feelings captured in a couple seconds and then shared with sound. They are joyous, imperfect, painful, and never longer than they need to be to convey precisely what was happening at the moment she got them out.

One of my favorite aspects of how the album is laid out includes split compositions like Smoky Hands, which opens the album with a little over a minute but then comes back around with a :28 second piece that washes over everything with a contemplative instrumental. It happens like that throughout, just the way life works out.

Purgatory/Paradise Is Near Perfect At 9.8 On The Liquid Hip Richter Scale. 

This is arguably the best album release of the year from an artist who has produced something largely unquantifiable in review. Sure, it's easy enough to say that Hersh has simply stayed true to what she considers a Muses tune. There is an expectant tone or groove that chases after her.

But what remains stridently different here isn't a single track or fleeting few seconds of an interlude. Purgatory/Paradise is a remarkable body of work in its totality, not only as an album with 32 tracks but also as an experience as interesting as the artists and musicians they were liberated from, especially from the head of Hersh.

You can find Purgatory/Paradise as a book or as an album on Amazon. You can download Purgatory/Paradise from iTunes. You can also find the book-framed album at Barnes & Noble and follow her on Facebook. If you are equally interested in all her work, you can always become a Strange Angel too.

Rat Girl by Kristin Hersh Will Embrace You

Sometimes when you read a book, you curl up and embrace it. Rarely does it embrace you back. Rat Girl: A Memoir (aka Paradoxical Undressing in the U.K.), written by Kristin Hersh and set for release next Tuesday in the U.S., is one such book. A rarity.

The cover may be black, but you won't find a single stitch of black in the content. Don't ask me to assign it another. In the opening pages of her book, Hersh mentions that colors splashed across a canvas are all too quiet. The book, like her music, is vibrant. Chords have color. Her favorite color is green.

"Every time I think I'm done, I pick another song out of the chaos in the air. There songs're keeping me alive so they can be alive."

When writers interview Hersh, they like to ask her about her bipolar disorder. In her book, she recounts one story where the first question in an interview asked what she does "when you wake up on the wrong side of lithium." In another interview, one referenced in our Crooked review, she's asked if it shapes her music.

That is what most of them are chasing. Rat Girl may put some of that to rest. It's independent.

She doesn't pull lyrics from thin air but from the unique way she sees the world, noticing the extraordinary inside something mundane, like a handmade Jesus crucifix that resembles a fish, nailed to an apartment wall. The music is different. She hears it and then learns it into reality much like some writers with gifts let words go from fingertips. It comes from someplace else.

She's said this before. But people don't always hear it. Perhaps this book will stick.

Rat Girl sometimes reads much the same, as if portions come from someplace else. And, despite following her story from one spring to the next (1985), it reads free from the trappings of time. Each part is oddly permanent, as if it exists in space, waiting to be played again.

This makes for an interesting narrative. Instead of relying on seamless transitions, Hersh ties stories together by lines of inspired lyrics and, occasionally, relevant 3- to 5-paragraph memories from her early childhood. The result is a beautiful fusion of prose and art. Book Notes provides an exquisite preview.

Then again, all this might make the book sound deeper than it needs to be. It's loaded with wit that will make you smile. It's as celebratory as her music. And in between some sad notes, expect to laugh out loud. Frequently.

"What's this song about?"

"About? I don't know."

"I heard the word blow jobs."

"That's two words."

He stares. "Is that what's this is about?"

I know he's baiting me, but I have no good answer. "Yeah, Gil, it's about blow jobs."

He smiles. "I want you to put yourself in this song. What do you think it's about?."

"My roommate, Vicky, painted some cool stuff on a box when she was moving and some of it turned up in a song."

He looks stunned. "Really? 'Vicky's Box' is a song about Vicky's box? A box owned by someone named Vicky?"

"Mostly," I say embarrassed. "That's why I called it that."

Welcome to the world of Hersh. It's beautiful every step of the way, even in darker moments. Any sadness that materializes isn't attached to her story as much as it's attached to how much hurt she endured along the way.

Rat Girl by Kristin Hersh Is A 9.6 On The Liquid Hip Richter Scale.

As a memoir, it isn't transparent and Hersh admits as much in the forward. It is, however, breathtakingly authentic, without reservations about anything she does share. It's a gift, much like it's a blessing to see beauty in ugliness and ugliness in beauty.

For Hersh, this is the way she is in the world. Rat Girl: A Memoir is available on Amazon, starting Tuesday. We'll add other format links as they become available. You can follow Hersh on Twitter and Facebook too.

Special thanks to Penguin Books for the thoughtfulness of an advance copy. It's already well worn and worth reading again and again.

Crooked Sets The Tone For A New Hersh Chapter

"I had a seizure one night, when I was a teenager, on the front step of Store 24 on Thayer Street in Providence." — Kristin With An Eye.

So starts a recent June post written by Kristin Hersh, founder of the alternative rock band Throwing Muses, before linking a story to the song Lazy Eye. The post is powerful, thoughtful, and ends on the note that no matter how cool we might want to be that our friends, lovers, and well-wishers always seem to catch us when our weirdness shines through our eye holes.

Her newest album, Crooked, was released July 19 in advance of her new Penguin published memoir, Rat Girl (aka Paradoxical Undressing in the U.K.), due out in August. Even more remarkable, Crooked: The Album was also released as a "book" eleven days prior in the U.K Both Crooked: The Album, which is slated for a U.S. release in September and Rat Girl will likely deserve their own reviews.

Crooked Discovers Kristin Hersh As Strong As Ever.

Crooked can stand on its own without any other niceties. Crooked, the song, will be the obvious fan favorite as it could easily fit on Learn to Sing Like a Star (especially since it was performed like Cats and Mice). Other standouts include Glass, Bliss, Static, and Krait (once it builds into the full instrumental).

As an album, there aren't any throwaways. Mississippi Kite is the hottest up tempo track while Moan and Flooding balance out everything beautifully with some disconnect and broodiness. It's strong, but not for some of the reviews you'll read online.

Certainly acupuncture has been an amazing treatment that seem to be easing the pain of her bipolar disorder, but some of the songs on Crooked have been floating around on her CASH Music experiment for some time.

For those who don't know, it's one of many reasons Hersh has continued to be unique. Her most loyal supporters have been funding her solo projects, ranging from Strange Angels ($30 per quarter) to Executive Producers (who even receive executive producer credit on her next CD).

Even more remarkable, Hersh releases everything on the site under a Creative Commons license, allowing fans to remix and create new non-commercial content using the songs. If the fans resubmit them, she posts them in an amazing remix thread. It's one of the ways Hersh has found a home in the new world of music.

"My songs are literally auditory hallucinations," she said in a recent interview. "Sure, I've experienced visual hallucinations while manic but the songs are completely independent of my bipolar disorder."

Kristin Hersh Captures A 9.2 On The Liquid Hip Richter Scale.

You can wait for the Crooked: An Album to be released in the United States (Strange Angels can find Crooked streamed here) or you can download Crooked on iTunes. You can also find a flurry of other tracks on CASH Music, including Lazy Eye, a new Throwing Muses demo.

No matter how you support this talented artist who barely broke into the mainstream, she continues to dazzle a handful of supportive fans, some of whom have been with her for decades. It almost always packs the stark and surreal writing that has defined her for most of her career.