[review 2005: the best of the year]

The final Throwing Muses record was a bittersweet reunion album. The Muses certainly knew how to get back up to speed; they turned everything up to 11 and proceeded to record the loudest, most aggressive album of their entire career. But almost from the beginning, the band decided that the comeback would be a one-time thing, and a permanent remount would be out of the question. Kristin Hersh, at the time, was still balancing a solo career and a family with the Muses reunion; the self-titled album was released on the same day as Hersh’s own The Grotto. The solo album stuck firmly to the quiet, contemplative territory of Hersh’s previous solo work. Perhaps because she had to juggle the material from both albums in her head, Hersh took an even more intimate and spare tack with The Grotto, almost as if she’d taken a regular Throwing Muses record (or one of her later solo works) and split it into yin and yang to form two.

Shortly after the Throwing Muses packed up shop for the second time, Hersh found herself in a new band with some of her old comrades. Apparently, after Hersh rediscovered the distortion pedal, she couldn’t get enough. If Throwing Muses and The Grotto were part of some musical balance, then 50 Foot Wave would explain why we haven’t heard a whole lot about a new Kristin Hersh solo album—the only thing that could balance Golden Ocean’s ferocious wall of sound is silence. A lot of early reviews of the album called it brutal, perhaps too brutal for fans used to Hersh’s oeuvre of delicate acoustic songs and Appalachian folk covers. (Speaking of which, she’s working on another collection of folk songs.) Even I found the album too harsh; coming off the high of Throwing Muses, hearing Hersh shriek so loud that you could feel your own vocal cords tear in sympathy was a bit painful and unpleasant.

Fast forward a couple of months, though, and suddenly it’s the Muses that sound too quiet. Golden Ocean is proof that Hersh and company haven’t lost their touch, over twenty years into the game. The accomplished performers by her side, fellow Muse Bernard Georges and Rob Ahlers, provide a solid foundation to the songs, with Ahlers delivering some particularly kinetic drumming. But really, it’s Hersh’s anthemic guitar work and her vocal performance that steals the show. Those moments where Hersh tries to physically blow out your eardrums with the sound of her voice? Now they’re bliss, not at all strange like they used to be. I discovered Kristin Hersh before I ever knew about the Throwing Muses, and so my first impression of her is from Strange Angels, singing oddly emotional songs on an acoustic guitar. The cover had her standing in soft focus, backed by a chorus of lit candles. This is not a woman who should be fronting an aggro punk rock band, and yet her transformation on Golden Ocean is utterly convincing.

When 50 Foot Wave set out to record their first album, they must’ve gone into the studio ready to tear a strip off something. In a year where so many albums were nuanced or subtle when they weren’t just outright boring, Golden Ocean is deliciously unrestrained and devastating in visceral impact. May Kristin Hersh and company continue to rock for years to come.