October 22–29, 1998

disc quicks|rock/pop

Throwing Muses

In a Doghouse

(Rykodisc)

It's been said that the best music is made by people who don't know what they're doing, and few albums bear that statement out as well as Throwing Muses' self-titled 1986 debut, finally given a stateside release as half of the two-disc In a Doghouse set. Founded by half-sisters Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donnelly (later of Belly and crappy solo album fame), the Muses served primarily as an outlet for Hersh's impassioned, tattered psyche. The lyrics for Throwing Muses sound like a series of oblique diary entries, not directly autobiographical, but too uniquely fractured to be about anyone else. The manic depressive Hersh learned to make more controlled music, but it's precisely her lack of restraint that makes Throwing Muses so viscerally frightening. True, the band—which also included bassist Leslie Langston, now part of Rosie O'Donnell's band, and drummer David Narcizo—sounds at times like it's about to fall apart, but that only increases the sense of fragility and danger. In the near immortal opening of "Hate My Way" -"I could be a smack freak/And hate society"—Hersh goes from a tremulous quiver to a throat-ripping shriek; a mood-swing rollercoaster turned into three-minute art. The album closes with "Delicate Cutters," but really all the songs are about self-mutilation in one way or another. Also part of the set is the 1987 Chains Changed EP, which continues in the same vein as the debut. The 1985 self-released Doghouse cassette features early versions of half of the debut but mostly shows how much producer Gil Norton contributed to Throwing Muses' wiry, brittle sound, and five basically negligible tracks written in 1983 but recorded by the band's final lineup in 1996.

-Sam Adams