THROUGHOUT her time helming Throwing Muses and as a solo artist, Kristin Hersh has inspired great respect and adoration from a confirmed coterie of fans, drawn to her cathartic music and strangely demure presence. But some of those adoring fans must
have felt that devotion slipping during this protracted presentation, entitled Paradoxical Undressing, which mixed songs from the Hersh vaults with lengthy readings from her book of the same title, set against a slideshow of pretty paintings by Molly Cliff Hilts.
Hersh's songs, much like PJ Harvey's, are visceral expressions of a deep, inner discourse. They are a form of therapy for Hersh and a source of fascination for the listener but pairing them with self-absorbed passages of prose inspired by her teenage diaries, in which she expounds, at drawn-out intervals, on her relationship with her music, was an indulgence too far.
Her writing is not without periodic flashes of wit and quirky insight but her delivery cloaked everything in almost suffocating seriousness. Her ghostly acoustic songs were actually light relief in this context, although she was plunged rather pretentiously into silhouette in front of the projections when she moved from speaking to singing.
By the second half, some of her listeners had made a break for the exit but it was at this point, late in the game, when she was just about gonged off by the venue curfew, that she broke out some of her most endearing memories about the early days of Throwing Muses and their dealings with 4AD Records bossman Ivo Watts-Russell. However, this flash of interest and accessibility was too little, too late to salvage the ponderous proceedings.
The full article contains 286 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
