Purgatory/Paradise

There’s a moment during the commentary packaged with Throwing Muses new album Purgatory/Paradise, after drummer Dave Narcizo offers up a particularly ribald interpretation of “Slippershell”, where Kristin Hersh stops and laughs away the credit: “Sure. God wrote it.” From almost anyone else, that would come off ridiculous, a megalomaniac’s humblebrag, but from Hersh it’s part of the origin story, the one that’s been repeated in everything written about Throwing Muses from the 80s onward. Hersh has always held that she’s not a songwriter so much as a woman accosted by songs; her role, she says, is more like a transcriptionist, or a vessel. Anything an outside audience might hear in them, the story goes, is coincidental. But Throwing Muses’ music never sounded like it sprung from any outside source so much as one that’s deeply personal­­. The chords lurch like feelings would; and the lyrics make internal sense. A track like “Fish” becomes far less surreal when you know that it’s referring to an actual fish nailed to an actual cross on Hersh’s actual apartment wall, but even then it’s like listening in on a few minutes of monologue, raw and untranslated, where the bits of dialogue, snippets of images, and the rest of the stuff of someone else’s inner life may well be a foreign language. There are plenty of Throwing Muses tracks that are oblique—and a lot more than the band gets credit for that are needle-direct—but few that explain themselves.

If this sounds at odds with finding a large audience, it’s because it is. Throwing Muses’ time on Warner in the 90s was neither pleasant nor lucrative. Hersh gave the label the rights to Hips and Makers to get out of her contract before releasing 1996’s Limbo, a title that now seems either prescient or biting. The Muses went on hiatus—or “disbanded,” which is both farther from the truth and closer to the practical reality. Hersh released solo albums on a fairly steady schedule, but Throwing Muses released only one more record: the triumphant Throwing Muses. That was in 2003. Hersh formed another project, 50 Foot Wave, around this time, but their last two EPs were released for free and quietly—as quietly, that is, as is possible for a band whose founding principle was “Throwing Muses, if they were faster, meaner and also swore a lot.” Hersh’s last solo album, Crooked, was self-released in 2009 nearly as quietly, supported mostly by house shows and smallish acoustic concerts. And though demos of Purgatory/Paradise existed online as early as 2007 (a few were meant for Crooked), the audience they found was largely the same fans who crowdfunded the record. (Hersh was among the first to adopt the pay-what-you-want and subscription models Kickstarter and its ilk would later make inescapable.) While Throwing Muses did tour behind 2011’s Anthology compilation, it would have taken close attention to think new material was forthcoming.

Purgatory/Paradise, as it turns out, is the Muses’ first album in 10 years, and “the work [the band] can die after releasing,” as Hersh jokes early in the commentary. (“We’re really looking forward to death. We work so hard to be allowed to die!”) But while 2003’s Throwing Muses was a comeback album in the familiar sense, roaring and tearing at all expectations from the first count-off, Purgatory/Paradise is more reserved. Of the Muses’ albums, it most resembles Red Heaven or Limbo, the forcefully aloof deep cuts of the Muses’ discography—but a shattered version, “like someone reached over our heads with a Looney Tunes mallet and slammed it into our record before we could stop him,” Hersh wrote. (Like Crooked, Purgatory/Paradise was devised both as a record and as a book, with essays by Hersh and art by Narcizo. It’s both a gorgeous standalone object—particularly the writing, considering 2010’s Rat Girl proved Hersh one of the best music writers around—and a sort of decoder for the album’s tracks.) Half of the album’s 32 tracks barely make it over two minutes. Some of them are reprises; sometimes the reprises come first. Some tracks are lopped-off bridges or choruses, or thoughts beginning with “and.” It’s even more disorienting for cuts like “Static” whose uncut versions have been around long enough to memorize. This doesn’t necessarily seem odd for a band whose songs tend to skitter into loping girl-group choruses halfway or careen through dozens of chords that wouldn’t normally touch or scare-quote the entirety of some kid’s anarchy pamphlet as an intro, but Purgatory/Paradise really is unlike anything I’ve heard this year; it’s a little like someone read an old Muses review that talked about their songs switching gears, recorded what they thought that sounded like, then lost half the data to a defragmenting snafu.

Not that Purgatory/Paradise is difficult or inaccessible. The beginning fakes you out with the almost stately folk of “Smoky Hands”, but it’s just scene-setting before a song accosts you: a crash, then “Morning Birds”, an onslaught of shredding then pathos that’s as wrenching as anything on the first Muses record. “Sunray Venus”, the single, comes shortly after, and it’s as joyous as “Morning Birds” is visceral. Like Wild Flag’s “Romance”, it’s an exuberant ode to band chemistry that plays out like the Muses rediscovering all their hits (“leaving, that is limbo—hey, I remember you!”) and comes with a splashy video full of wordplay and intertextual Easter eggs. Later on is “Sleepwalking”, a college-rock throwback where everything from the guitar lines to the glaze of the vocal processing seems imported from 1992. It’d be shameless if it weren’t so huge (and self-aware; the band calls it their “RC Cola song”), and it’s easy to imagine it on Doolittle or Last Splash—or for that matter Throwing Muses again; you can even trace out where Tanya Donelly’s harmonies would go.

But that’s the second version of “Sleepwalking” you hear: the first version is what would ordinarily be end of the song, a one-minute acoustic hangover. Songs come and go like this, or more specifically moments: bassist Bernard Georges’ sly lead on “Cherry Candy”, the spy riff and ballroom pirouette of a drum fill that introduces “Film” or the piano waltz it becomes halfway, the panflutes of “Folding Fire” (if any instrument’s unexpected on a Throwing Muses album, that would be it), certain melodies that recur or slip into the wrong tracks. The album, to its credit, rarely feels indulgent—only the two aimless “Curtains” stand out as possible edits—and the more you listen, the more a method emerges from the muddle.

Purgatory/Paradise, more than any of Hersh’s records to date, is an album about loss, which might account for its fracturing. The closest thing to a traditionally built song is the bitterly determined “Milan”, about a neighborhood in New Orleans where Hersh's house was destroyed after Hurricane Katrina. Everything else is tentative: memories listed in order of disapperance. Sometimes the loss is literal, as in “Static”, written for a close friend who died; the arrangement tiptoes at first, then plunges straight into denial. Sometimes it’s almost funny: “Terra Nova”, about the Muses’ first breakup, is aimless and resigned, melodies delivered like shrugs, until it breaks out the “Bittersweet Symphony” strings. Sometimes it’s not funny at all, as on “Quick,” a song built uneasily atop a cello dirge, or “Bluff,” which is a curious lilting minute at first until its essay turns hazy into heartbreaking: “If you watch your friends carefully, sometimes you'll notice their features beginning to change: curling up into themselves, looking within rather than without, their senses dulled.” (The more I listen, the more it seems like a direct companion to “Flooding”, the saddest song Hersh has ever recorded.)

Purgatory/Paradise isn’t an easy listen—expected enough from a band that’s repeatedly referred to the recording process as being “on a [desert] island". If Throwing Muses didn’t explain themselves before, they’re certainly not doing so now, and for a comeback album, it’s so willfully at odds with any music consumption trend in 2013. Even as you imagine what these songs used to sound like, it’s hard to imagine actually listening to them that way, let alone shuffled in with anything else; its pieces are simply too small and elusive to listen to individually. They’d sound out of place on playlists, maybe bewildered in setlists. But as Hersh wrote to accompany “Swollen,” an album offcut (though the essay did become the introduction to the book), “It is not un-beautiful to be in pieces, as long as those pieces are fully realized.” It may be impossible for Throwing Muses to write anything that isn’t.