Saturday night. Throwing Muses in Liverpool. A live music event on Merseyside that is sold out, which is more of a collector’s item these days, but I couldn’t think of a better band to achieve the feat than Kristin Hersh’s much-loved band.
Inside the Philharmonic Music Room, just looking around, and it’s a night for the lifers. Faded band T-shirts aplenty, with the winner being the gentleman sporting the Einstürzende Neubauten tee which looks like it was pulled from the same skip as most of the instruments the German experimentalists sourced 40 years ago. Awesome.
Tonight, support comes from duo, Forgetting You Is Like Breathing Water, who have been along for the ride on the back of their self-titled debut released last year. In what goes to go down a treat, trumpeter Will Evans and multi-instrumentalist, Theo Trump, bathe the audience in the kind of off-kilter noise only a band on the Unheard of Hope roster can offer. Perhaps a leftfield choice as a Throwing Muses support act, but with a curious audience in tow, the duo may have picked some new disciples.
It’s not long before we are greeted by the night’s main attraction. The current Throwing Muses itineration, seeing Hersh joined by Fred Abong on drums, her son Dylan on bass, and cellist Pete Harvey. As the band enter the stage to much adulation, soon they launch into their work with one of the first jewels from the Moonlight Concessions crown, Theremini.
Instantly, it reminds me of bands touring on new albums, which in most cases they actually don’t, instead opting to shoehorn three or four new songs in amongst past glories. Supposed victory laps that are more like a limp. Not Throwing Muses, though. Hersh, harbouring a fierce belief in the new material she has written, and so she should. Moonlight Concessions, one of the year’s top records and having spent a career injecting homespun warmth into alt-rock like no other, the latest Throwing Muses statement feels like the most defining one.
And that evidence is solidified tonight. In-between old favourites Counting Backwards, Soap and Water (played at unhinged, bullet-train speed) and one of the night’s many brilliant flashes, Limbo, tonight is positively heavy with the band’s last three full-length release, led by 2013’s Purgatory Paradise (the swirling road-trip alt-rock of Sunray Venus being the pick of the bunch), 2020’s glorious slow burn that is Sun Racket and, of course, Moonlight Concessions.
Where the latter is concerned, the songs maintain the spirit and power in this room as they do on record. Hersh’s work is fierce. Her gaze, like a laser beam trained to a spot at the back of the room, as her husky roar explodes with raucous energy felt by everyone in the audience. (Especially the giddy bloke at the front, who, for the most part, is in fits of incoherent hysteria, which the band kindly indulge in-between their songs.)
It’s all here. The sunroof sway of Summer of Love; the hypnotic chug of South Coast; the achingly beautiful Sally’s Beauty; the highwire drama of Albatross and, of course, Moonlight Concessions’ dirge-laden eponymous song in which the band closes with. All like wonderful diaristic half-thoughts that slowly morph into stories that radiate with a warmth and honesty only Kristin Hersh can harness. These songs, quite simply, among the best in the Throwing Muses canon.
Encores can go either way, but with Shark Throwing Muses ensure that this victory lap remains in full stride in what is a beautiful collision between grunge and alt-rock. Then there’s Bright Yellow Gun, and amid the flurry of material the band has dispatched tonight, criminally it’s a song you almost forget about until the first notes ring off Hersh’s guitar – performed with the same brawn and gusto as the day it was released, closing the curtain on this night of triumph.
A vibe machine of both past and present, Throwing Muses deliver one of the most emphatic live performances of the year. It’s that simple. Kristin Hersh, a one-woman army in what is undoubtedly the year of Throwing Muses.
