Kristin Hersh — Clear Pond Road
Throwing Muses and 50 Foot Wave force of nature returns
‘Once more with feeling’ sings Kristin Hersh on Bewitched Reruns, the lead track on Clear Pond Road — her first album in five years — the track’s circular, hypnotic twang spiralling into the televisual past. Forerunner to Kurt Cobain, proto-Riot Grrl, Rat Girl author and now Mother of (four) Sons, Kristin Hersh is the sound of husky 21st century Americana.
‘It sounds like thunder in here’ she continues, before Ms Haha and Dandelion comprise the most powerful twosome Hersh has written since Your Ghost (with REM’s Michael Stipe) and the sublime Trouble.
‘Come back Mr Bones to the flashback we call home’ she sings on the shufflingly ominous …Haha, spinning out the bittersweet nostalgia of the opening track. Hersh’s original band Throwing Muses are repeatedly evoked in the hypnotic circularity of her arrangements; mournful, almost gothic lead lines snaking in now and then — a role which would have once been occupied by step-sister Tanya Donnelly in TM.
Loss and unmet expectations are constantly alluded to, but in true Sylvia Plath style, never specified, a seemingly permanent literary gift in Hersh’s songwriting. Nothing is on the nose, everything multi-layered, all emotions deeply felt, pondered over and eventually, almost grudgingly recorded. Dandelion is a ghostly Nick Cave-inflected spectre, as ‘after midnight, we don’t have far to go’, referring either to getting older, or losing companionship, ‘like watching something burn’.
Kristin Hersh has consistently been extremely real, ensuring the mechanisms of the music industry are kept over there, while the creation is done over here. The tone and texture of Clear Pond Road is languid and reflective, its creators’ unexpected, thrilling chord changes jarring in all the right places, sending shivers up the spine as they send a song careening in a new direction (as on Constance Street and Eyeshine).
From Atlanta, Georgia to Rhode Island, Hersh’s sound evokes a post-grunge-era Great American Sound, possibly the result of their creator turning her synesthesia and PTSD-related histories into interpretive art. The spirit of independence has always been powerful in Hersh, a person unafraid to go into her inner world in lyric or prose, or indeed cathartic scream. How she manages this in a hegemonic music industry which see her sort of obstreperousness either as an irritant or a disorder is to be increasingly admired. Kristin Hersh, keeping it quietly but laceratingly real since 1981.
Listen to Clear Pond Road here: https://open.spotify.com/album/6zJSjhTjCS8FKOxS9M5D4s
