Throwing Muses: Moonlight Concessions

There has always been very little fat to trim in the Throwing Muses canon. Kristin Hersh, a master of reaching the core emotional response in one line where most others would be afforded four or five and still not reach the desired mark. Perfect case in point, You’re Clouds – the penultimate track from Throwing Muses’ new long-player, Moonlight Concessions, where Hersh sings, “I cry and laugh/ Both seem right”. And, of course, they do.

The core line-up of Hersh, bassist, Bernard Georges and drummer, David Narcizo, have spent a career polishing rough diamonds for a devoted listenership. That gravitational pull, largely from the weight of Hersh’s songs; her observations, knife-sharp but delivered with a tender, homespun warmth. It’s this contrast that’s always required close attention. Indie rock’s answer to deep listening, and Hersh’s voice, now beautifully worn into a gnarled, gravelly purr that radiates the space around you, it makes Throwing Muses version 2.0 a concoction that every music fan needs.

Following 2020’s Sun Racket, Moonlight Concessions eclipses its majesty from every vantage point. With 50 Foot Wave’s excellent 2022 release, Black Pearl, and Hersh’s equally enlightening solo cut a year later in Clear Pond Road, the dream grunge of former was boiled down to something more skeletal on the latter, and that residue drips into Moonlight Concessions. That “shimmer on horizons” Hersh referenced during 1995’s, Shimmer, brighter than ever.

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Written largely in The Gulf of Mexico and Southern California, Moonlight Concessions was produced by Hersh at Steve Rizzo’s Stable Sound Studio. Filled with poetic snapshots and abstract reflections on life, there’s so much space and solitude that underpins these songs. But even with that space and solitude, there’s an overriding tension and anxiety, which Hersh endeavours to unpick.

On the opening acoustic-led opener, Summer of Love, she explores people’s behavioural patterns in different environments and how, ultimately, it doesn’t change you (“A finally life as it should’ve been / A finally life as it should be”). Hersh, irreverent and defiant as ever.

The coastal backdrops continue on South Coast. Like Summer of Love, it’s a song mapped out on acoustic guitar with embellishments added later, and with a line like, “Don’t have a rescue up my sleeve / This is your rhythm / Not your melody”, it’s supremely Kristin Hersh, akin to prose dripping off the page. So too on Libretto – the ebb and flow, hot and cold rush that one sometimes feels throughout a relationship, Hersh masterfully incorporates home comforts as a metaphor to pull the song to its logical conclusion (“Do you take your coffee like I take my tea?”).

Similar themes dominate Albatross, which sees Hersh in soulful, one-woman army mode, and backed by Georges and Narcizo’s bluesy thrum, Throwing Muses use the song’s namesake as thematic symbol for keeping a relationship afloat. Then there’s Sally’s Beauty – a sleepy ballad that bristles along the fault lines in what is one of the band’s finest songs. With themes that darken the door, accompanied by a cyclic riff that conjures up heady emotional force, it showcases how sonic simplicity can reach the greatest depths.

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Elsewhere, the delicately abstract Drugstore Drastic is one of those songs that falls into the lap of someone of Hersh’s songwriting ilk. Words and one-liners, picked at random and stitched together to form something imbued in street-level honesty.

Like You’re Clouds, the closing title track sees Hersh using contrast to wonderful effect (“It’s raining like a son of a bitch / Damn sun, shining like a son of a bitch”). It’s an endorphin rush the best songs give you, and as she parts with another gem, “I took a bullet for you / Smiling,” in many ways, it paints an accurate picture of Throwing Muses. That selflessness that has always permeated underneath many of their songs, it’s why people harbour so much love for the band. And on the back Moonlight Concessions that love will only grow stronger, for it’s one of the most important documents Throwing Muses has produced.

Moonlight Concessions is out now via Fire Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.