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Phantoms in the Ear

Kristin Hersh was just 16 when she started experiencing auditory hallucinations. A pint-sized teenager growing up in Rhode Island, she began hearing songs whole, broadcast through her, as if she was an antenna receiving extraterrestrial signals. Hersh had been playing guitar since she was nine, and had formed a band with her step-sister, Tanya Donelly, at 14, so she was uniquely gifted to translate the songs flowing through her.

Their project, Throwing Muses, didn't become a 'real' band until Hersh was 17, and bars in Boston began to let them play. With three teenage girls —one, bassist Leslie Langston, being (gasp!) black— they were hardly your standard bar-band. In either membership or music.

Like the whole songs Hersh heard in her head, Throwing Muses arrived with an aesthetic fully formed. They weren't the product of shopworn influences, out to retread old records, but a band brand new; teenage debutantes fashioning strains of psychedelia, new-wave, punk, country, and college rock into a sound all their own; a twisted tangle of snaking guitars and snarling vocals.

On the strength of a demo tape, Throwing Muses were the first US inking for English indie 4AD, a label that'd had early success —the Birthday Party, Bauhaus, Cocteau Twins— but weren't yet the iconic imprint they'd become (the Muses, in fact, the fateful signing that lead to subsequent deals with The Pixies and The Breeders). It was 1985, Hersh was 17, pregnant, and, with the band relocated to Boston, she was homeless, living out of her car.

Oh, and she'd just been diagnosed as schizophrenic.

I Make You Into a Song

By any measure —musical, personal, historical, contemporary, artistically— Throwing Muse's self-titled 1986 debut is a phenomenal work. Hersh, unmoored and unafraid, threw herself into the tumult of her music; let her songs skate on their perilous slopes of psychological torment, let herself live out their fever-pitch emotion. Like those other great lyrical signposts of the alternative '80s, Michael Stipe and Black Francis —both artists who Hersh was, at times, closely connected to— she's singing, essentially, glorious nonsense; completely unaware of what this fractured poetry, pouring at through her, may mean.

But, god, hearing Hersh wail and scream, all fevers and tremors and haunted confessions, every syllable is alive with profound emotion, somehow seeming to speak the incommunicable. The first time she sings the titular words in "Rabbits Dying" they sound terrifying; like Hersh's voice is about to give out. Then she croaks out, in even creakier voice: "Don't run blind/Don't swallow the pain/Don't save the brain."

In the middle of the hiccuping, clip-clopping cowbell/funk-bass rhythms of "America (She Can't Say No)"," Hersh sighs "I'm afraid, I'm a mess"; amidst the jangling guitars and unexpected synth-piano glints of "Vicky's Box," she repeats "I feel boxed in" as if under the weight of unbearable burdens; and over the stark acoustic strums of "Delicate Cutters" —which presages the amazing solo LPs Hersh would make — she turns the simple syllable "I" into a strangulated wail, a banshee cry of sheer delirium.

The utterly beautiful "Hate My Way," where Hersh and Donelly's guitars tumble in a giddy waltz and Langston's bass sings high and sweet, becomes near unbearable because of its emotional pitch: which skips through conflict emotions, each felt in extremis. In one voice, Hersh screams "I sit up late in the morning" like the words are caustic and burning; croons "How do they kill children?" in the sweetest harmony with her step-sister; then whimpers "And why do I want to die?," voice hoarse and heartbeat weak.

A New Band

Throwing Muses received a rapturous critical reception in the UK, but it was never released in the US; it, in fact, remains essentially unreleased in Hersh's homeland to this day. The band would go on to make records that attracted more attention (1991's poppy The Real Ramona) or sold way more copies (1995's wire-tight, radio-sharp University). Hersh's debut solo LP Hips and Makers presented her tunes as stark, ghostly acoustic lullabies; in some ways a more fitting presentation for their lyrical eeriness. Donelly founded The Breeders and Belly, success greeting both endeavors.

But nothing the band, or its members, accomplished thereafter ever quite cast the same spell as they did on their debut. Here, the quartet truly threw themselves into Hersh's haunted poetry and clanging compositions with youthful exuberance and unguarded fearlessness. This is the sound of a band living their art, playing as if their existences depend on it. There's not a single dishonest note, not a beat that doesn't feel as if its pounding home their authenticity: Throwing Muses staking out a sound personal, individual, and utterly new.

Record Label: 4AD
Release Date: August, 1986