Throwing Muses are band who, for many, are associated with the heyday of late 80s US alternative / indie, and spawned not only Belly, but Tanya Donelly’s solo career – and of course, Tanya Donelly would go on to enjoy a solo career post-Belly. But since reconvening in 2002, following a five-year break, Throwing Muses have been plugging away, releasing an eponymous album in 2003 (to which Donelly contributed), ‘Purgatory / Paradise’ a decade later, and ‘Sun Racket’ in 2020.
Taking inspiration from here, there, and everywhere, including overheard conversations and internal dialogues, the lyrics are a veritable collage, and this is a set of songs which are detailed and textured, with much going on behind and between the superficial ordinary surface elements. The production and mixing, too, heightens the quirkiness: there’s something about the sound and the deadening of the acoustic guitar sound which is pitched to the fore on opener ‘Summer of Love’ which sounds somehow ‘different’, before you even come to the extraneous incidentals.
In some ways, this approach of tossing different things in here and there is reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s early albums, where instruments and backing vocals would drift in and fade out seemingly at random, adding not only texture but a certain strangeness. The string-soaked brooding ‘Theremini’ is wispy and sparse, while ‘Albatross’ offers fiery folk, and single cut ‘Drugstore Drastic’ is simple but dynamic and packs an edge that’s not a million miles from ‘Rid of Me’ era PJ Harvey.
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With ‘You’re Clouds’ and the title track driving hard into the home straight, it’s a remarkably strong finish to an album that doesn’t put a foot wrong, doesn’t contain a weak track, and is pure quality and dazzlingly different from beginning to end.
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