Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Throwing Muses, Fire Records 2020.
Throwing Muses is a rock trio that hail from Newport, Rhode Island and Sun Racket is the first album that I’ve heard from them, although the band has been in existence since the 1990s.
It’s a really interesting album of modulated and distorted guitar driven rock built over a solid foundation of hypnotic bass and drums that are often held in tight and insistent rhythms.
Sun Racket is the band’s tenth album and it’s apparently quite a departure from their recent output, especially Purgatory/Paradise which was an album of half-finished songs and ideas.
This album presents 10 songs that are all complete with beginnings, middles, and ends and they all seem to work together to form a larger integrated and complete work.
The band is fronted by Kristen Hersh and her songs, and often plaintiff vocals, are set against a wall of sound that often builds from calm and ethereal to a raucous and cacophonous melee.
This is experimental alternative rock at its best; Rock music that intrigues and makes you think.
It’s an album that demands to be listened to, that asks you to stop what you’re doing and sit for a while.
Sun Racket combines two disparate energies; the heavy, and what Kristen describes as the music box, and it’s the combination of these two often contradictory elements that propels this album forward.
The opening track, Dark Blue, is built around a heavy, almost grinding, guitar riff with Kirsten’s vocals floating over and around the edifice of sound while the equally cacophonous Bo Diddley bridge has Hersh swimming in the river once the bridge has collapsed.
The songs morph from heavy to dreamlike on the tracks like Milk at McDonald’s and Sue but although they are slower they are no less intense.
Throwing Muses music is engaging because they explore unusual and creative rhythms, tempos, and chord progressions.
This is not a straightforward rock album.
It’s this unorthodoxy that provides a point of difference.
