Throwing Muses dispense beautifully savage music

Although one can see it as plain as a strobe light, it is somewhat unconceivable that this band is on this stage, right here, right now! We thought that after 1997 all we could expect from Throwing Muses were trawls through the vaults for different compilations, selection of live albums, but a reunion!? And, it emerges to have been quite a while in coming: the eponymous comeback album was cut 18 months before getting to your local aisle. (It formed a tandem with the same-day release of Kristin Hersh’s solo effort, ‘The Grotto’, a positive and a negative of the creatoress’ anxious soul.)

The stage is bare, just the instruments, three of them, some lights and – tonnes of tones! Hersh is camera-right, bassist Bernard Georges to the left, drummer David Narcizo is perched in the middle for a show that fills one with a sense of deja-vu. No, not that the music is dated – it can never be because Throwing Muses always made genre-free albums – it just feels familiar. And yet, the band sounds better than before, somehow looser, less bent on impressing everybody, it simply is.

That comes with experience and the inevitable time-accumulation that makes is sad that our ageist society forever feeds off fresh ‘pounds-of-flesh’ while the ‘oldsters’ improve. It is really disheartening to see that majority of the audience are men who didn’t need to shave their heads to hide receding hairlines when the band performed the last time; younger kids don’t get clued up to whence female cohorts find their inspiration and sense of purpose, even someone like Avril Lavigne. Throwing Muses are a seminal band!

Technically speaking, this three play nonchalantly, there is not an iota of strain; Hersh is such a fine guitarist who can deliver fragile parts, vulnerable as well as tough, vicious riffs. She would have been hailed as a guitar-hero if she were of the opposite sex, but this a sexist industry and the public can’t claim any better. Precious little is said from the stage, it was left to the music to do all the jiving. And, it funked with material mainly based on the new album but treasures-of-yore were surely there (see Set list below) for an entirely beautifully-savage experience.

Kristin and the boys release chords with force, passion, harshness, dirty, indie-spirited, fired up by the incredible response. The band’s got a gigantic online following – Link to their site – but there is nothing like the encounter of the third kind. Those e-fans were the reason the band regrouped: in spring 2000 a hang-out-with-cyber-fraternity day was organized in Boston. On that occasion Tanya Donelly played with them for the first time in a decade and, long-term fan Bob Mould performed a surprise acoustic set.

Tonight’s show is a victory of the durable past over the clone-prone future and this band shouldn’t rejoin the history again. This is too good to be without!

Set list:

Furious
Bea
Shark
Pandora’s Box
SolarDip
Flamingos
Start
Hazing
Civil Disobedience
Speed and Sleep
Limbo
Pretty or Not
Mercury
Portia
Gun
Flying
Two Step
Pearl
Maria
Vicky’s Box