Throwing Muses
Daughters of the Fatherland

Excerpted from Melody Maker, January 28, 1989
Written by David Stubbs. Photos by Andy Catlin
Melody Maker is published by IPC Magazines





We're crowded into the corner of the Holiday Inn bar in Boston, a city where it takes three quarters of an hour to walk to the nearest liquor store. They're getting high on lobster anecdotes and coffee and I'm sinking what booze I can. Throwing Muses have emerged, chuckling, from the crisis of one of Kristin's songs exploding inside her head with "Hunkpapa" which, I tell them, could well be their-er-breakthrough album...

"Well, that's good to hear..."

But it may disappoint a few scabby diehards. The songs are still like ghost trains across a (Neil) Diamond landscape but some of the bristles have turned to clouds, the abrupt physical seizures have been massaged away, edges turned into curves. There's a sense of motion, a golden, rocky feel, an assurance in lieu of the zig-zag free-fall into a sea of entrails that was "Chains Changed" or "House Tornado" which Spin magazine depressingly described as "impenetrable."

A move like is is perfectly understandable, and it was almost sweet of the Muses to make it.

Kristin: "It was a little bit conscious, in that we started to think that most of the people who wrote to us were either musicians or crazy people and most of the people who liked the records were into alternative music anyway, college DJs. And we thought, 'Maybe that's right.' If you're not impressing anybody in the mainstream, then you must be doing something right! But that's not fair, we don't want to become an elitist venture, and I don't think we're getting our job done if we make it too difficult for people to listen to us. So, as we were going through the material, I'd say, 'Cut it in half, cut it in half again, then cut it in half again, repeat it a couple of times,' because I'd say that the average person doesn't want to follow all the counter-melodies and rhythmic shifts and chord changes. But the material was strong enough to support that."

David: "I feel that, at last, I've finally learned how to play the drums..."

A cackling, female chorus: "That helped!"

The mess inside

"Hunkpapa" is no cop-out, there's simply a sense that things have fallen into all-over-the-place, that the Muses have finally hit the ground and are beginning to roll. "Devil's Roof" spills forth energy from the surgical wound of a rigorous self analysis -- "I have two heads..." -- culminating in the violently ambivalent shriek, "Where's my husband???"

"Mania" drags its entrails through the dust, a naked, untrammelled, unfinished babble that is private and declarative, sardonic and desperate by turns. "Bea" is more unchartered feminism -- "Nobody knows your pain, nobody sees my world" -- not so much out of the kitchen as out of the stomach, glowering, accelerating, blazingly oblique. Tanya's songs -- "Dragonhead" and "Angel" -- little white clouds to Kristin's sleet -- have fdeveloped a whiplash silver lining of their own.

The single, "Dizzy," is pat, but dazzling and scorched by turns. Kristin's voice still drills painfully close to the nerve -- not so much like a shot of adrenalin as an attack of pins and needles, paralyzing and tingling. She's "Eastender's" Michelle courting madness, Karen Carpenter wasted to the bone, Stevie Nicks shredded. Every vowel is gutted, every declaration soiled and obscured by a flood of physical, interior matter, unglossed glossolia, those shrieks that have yet to take the form of language and are, therefore, all the more charged with meaning. The sheer physicality of the Muses' sound -- all melodies and stumbling blocks -- makes the perfect mess, not so much thrash as thresh.

But now that the Muses are on the threshold, how do they sustain the energy? Life goes on, and sometimes all that's left is reiteration. What is there left to spew?

Kristin: "We're kind of having to go backwards and figure out a way of purifying ourselves, or of presenting a basic psychological foundation that everyone can fall back on, a way of presenting all the complexities we dealt with in the past.

It's like, my dad writes for this psychology journal and it's fine and I read it but I always get the feeling that it's just this little camp of philosophers and psychologists writing papers for one another which is sad, because the people it's really for learn nothing from it."

Caffeine and catharsis

And yet, giving vent to the dirt inside you is a major American TV preoccupation at the moment, from Oprah Winfrey through a whole host of Kilroy-Silk type hosts, passing among troubled audiences, exhorting them to "verbalize" their problems. (In Boston, a city where it takes three quarters of an hour to walk to the nearest liquor store, one is reduced to watching a lot of TV). Are Throwing Muses implicated in the great American project of catharsis, the sideshow of public confession?

Kristin: "Actually, ahh the songs are about Leslie! They're more like stories really, there are just chunks of me thrown in, my ... humanity ..."

The great thing is, you make it sound like vomiting, as opposed to an act of hygiene. The TV exhortation to catharsis always seems to be part of a conspiracy to make us cleaner inside, more normal, more productive, more useful citizens.

"Exactly, yeah! I saw this guy on TV the other day talking about 'catharsis' this and 'catharsis' that and ..."

Catharsis is such a crappy word!

"Yeah! It's not like, 'Spit it out! Woo! It's gone!' It's like, it's just there and you can't dig it out, it's in your veins, it is." Another gulp of brown water. "Sheesh, I'm a coffee addict!"

Kristin's neighbors all assume she must be married, since she is sharing a house with a man and it really seems more trouble than it's worth to disillusion them. Do you not feel profoundly disenchanted in such an arid, youthless, puritanical environment?

Kristin: "Maybe I just expect to be, I dunno. These guys live in Boston, so I suppose everything's fine for them, but I'm just as everyone else expects me to be -- I'm a housewife!"

Do you mind that? Does that worry you?

"Er -- no. Should it? We don't listen to them enough. I like the cyclical aspect of that lifestyle. People talk about housewives like, 'Oh God, a thousand years of drudgery, a meaningless existence,' as if women were stupid enough to be just talked into being dishwashers. People think it doesn't go anywhere because it's cyclical, the same routine everyday. They feel it's better to be out in careers, making more money for more corporations, they think that's more important!

"It's also really violent! Have you ever washed up? All those dishes? BASH! CRASH! With kids running around, your emotions are up and down, it's a perfectly noisy and traumatic thing to write about. Actually, the joke is I'm not really a housewife but I think the story has to be told."

Hence the House Tornado that tumbles through the Muses sound -- not so much everything but the kitchen sink as everything in the kitchen sink.

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