Now
here's a real name from the past... I'd jump all over a Throwing Muses gig in a
heartbeat (indeed, I did at my last opportunity, that Trinity gig 926 in
September 2014 – nearly 5 years ago now!), but a Kristin Hersh solo gig was
always something to approach with a bit more circumspection. Don't get me
wrong, big fan of the crazy ol' gal, it's just that I've found her solo output
considerably less to my tastes than the wonderful Muses, finding it folkier,
mellower, more introspective, and generally lacking the thrillingly ragged and
jagged off-kilter punch that her band provides. Hence la Hersh's solo absence
from my Dance Card for nearly 18 (!) years (since gig 501, the Empire in April
2001, in fact), until... it wasn't so much the fact that Kristin announced a
gig at The Fleece that inticed me into booking tix for this one, more so the
tagline... "Kristin Hersh, Live And Loud"... Loud? Hmmm, alright
then, I’ll try some of that...
Fellow old school Muses fans Ady and Beef were up for it, and Stuart had a free evening so gave this a late call to join us, so it was vitrually the same line-up as last Thursday rocking down the M4 to Brizzle, this time in the Beef Buggy! Hit the venue at 7.30 doors - virtually the first in! - and chatted while the place filled up. Eventually the late-running support kicked off at 8.30, turning out to be Kristin's bassist Fred Abong doing a solo set. This meant a clutch of effects-dominated dour and dark little solo guitar ditties, followed by a swap to a fat acoustic and some more stripped-back, morose folky numbers. Short and snappy, and often finishing abruptly, the material was okayish, if somewhat samey, delivered at a swift pace by the throaty-vocalled and taciturn Fred. However, I wished that Laura Kidd's bid to get her band She Makes War on as tonight's support (which she mentioned to me last week at the Desperate Journalist gig) had been successful...
We kept our spots at the front as the diminutive Kristin, bedecked in floral dress and beetle-crusher boots, led her trio onstage at 9.30. I'd picked up Kristin's 2018 album "Possible Dust Clouds" for pre-gig research, and after a couple of goes through, I definitely wasn't going to file it under "Easy Listening"... harking back to that posr-Tanya Muses era, it's a collection of degenerate misfits of songs, overlaid with swathes of guitar reverb, delivered in a brutal, uncompromising hard rasp of a voice. Such was the case tonight, with opener "Lax" a bleak and bitter march, a more dour (dourer?) version of the Muses' "Counting Backwards", and an early double of the galloping and groovy "Mississippi Kite" and an excellent "Sunray Venus" from that last, sprawling Muses album, both delivered with venomous snarling vocals by Kristin, were highlights. Some nice early banter as well, as Kristin messed up the running order, blaming her set-list as it was written on a paper plate, then quipping, "we'd like to kill one goddamn tree [for some paper] before this tour is over!"
Unfortunately, "Your Ghost" was heavy-handed and jarring, lacking th bleak and haunting feel of the CD verion, and thereafter it all started to go a bit South for me, many of the numbers bleeding into one, and their interpretations doing them no favours tonight, many being heavily drum-dominated... Someone really needed to tell drummer Rob Ahlers that his kit was there to be played, not battered into noisy submission! It also didn't help that th stage remained very dimly lit throughout, a couple of blue scatter-lights offering scant visibility, so Kristin's usual head-bobbing intensity was lost in the crepuscular murk.
"Limbo" finally started to turn things around, set closer "Cuckoo" was a spooky backwoods Appalachian folk number recalling Cordelia's Dad (!), and the crunchy, wah-wah feedback drenched encore "Broke" (a 50 Foot Wave number, apparently, but one I have to confess I was unfamiliar with) ended a variable performance on a relative high. Various opinions on the gig in the car afterwards during an unimpeded drive home, not all of them in concert with my own, so all in all a real curate's egg of a performance from an unpredictable maverick. Overall, I'm glad that I reconnected with Kristin "live" tonight, but next time, and rather perversely, I might be more inclined to see her less "loud"...
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