Throwing Muses return and sing songs aquatic; toasting the dark blue of the water, the New Orleans bywater viewed from New England’s Bo Diddley bridge. The bridge collapsing, the water waiting – who’s saving us?
Returning with their signature sound, the legendary Boston trio Throwing Muses, consisting of Kristin Hersh, David Narcizo and Bernard Georges, release their tenth studio album ‘Sun Racket’ on 22nd May via Fire Records.
The follow up to 2013’s ‘Purgatory/Paradise’ is an outpouring of modal guitars, reverbed shapes, pounding drums and driving bass set behind Kristin Hersh’s well-thumbed notebook of storylines and haunting vocals that get into your psyche.
A ten-song opus of suitably wrought tales set against a wall of sound that’s at once calm and ethereal before building into glorious cacophonous crescendos.
Drummer, David Narcizo: “Sun Racket has always been geographical… a transplanted southerner in New England crash landing in California. A West Coast sound at New England scale, dragged back down to the south where the elements got more aggressive but now with deeper roots.”
When they made their last album a few years back, they were shattered. Pieces were coming and going, elements repeating and charging the whole. “It sounded beautiful jumping around like that.” Two-minute songs reappearing as twisted instrumentals or another song’s bridge. They mimicked the effect live which kept them on their toes. Whatever was happening was already over in other words.
‘Sun Racket’ is the opposite. It refused to do anything but sit still. It says, “sit here and deal.”
“All it asked of us was to commingle two completely disparate sonic vocabularies: one heavy noise, the other delicate music box. Turns out we didn’t have to do much. Sun Racket knew what it was doing and pushed us aside, which is always best. After thirty years of playing together, we trust each other implicitly but we trust the music more” – Kristin Hersh
Hersh’s songwriting is like a poison pen letter revealing terrible secrets.
“I don’t regret a single drop of alcohol” ‘Milk at McDonald’s’ admits. This is tell-all phone-in radio, these are everyday stories, the puzzles of life.
“The devil has no soul” closing cut, the mysterious ‘Sue’s’ explains.
And so, they continue. Business unusual.
