CULT RECORD: THROWING MUSES: "THROWING MUSES" (1986)

Throwing Muses' melodic hooks,willed riffs and hypnotic rhythms are islands rising out of chaos-- safe but slippery stones leading across a river of needs and disappointments. Originally a group of Newport, Rhode Island, teenagers inspired by Velvet Underground records to create odd songs with dark moods, the Muses have become an accomplished vehicle for principal songwriter Kristin Hersh's intense salvos in her battles against depression and domesticity. Hersh's obscure yet intimate lyrics, and unique sense of songcraft and guitar-playing,recall Nick Drake or Joni Mitchell, but the Muses splice skittering punk into their folk, raising the decibels on their confrontations with confusion.
Following a seven-inch EP and an excellent but hard-to-find self-distributed cassette, Throwing Muses, the first release of an American band on 4AD, captures the angst of a gifted, strong-willed adolescent struggling not to get swallowed into the compromises of womanhood. "A kitchen is a place where you break things, and clean up," Hersh sings in "Vicky's Box." Hersh moans, screams and shakes her voice in a death-rattle vibrato; she has admitted suffering from often severe depression. Her songs are complex assemblages patterned more on mood swings than trad song forms, with inventive mixtures of rock, reggae, tribal and martial rhythms, and the band veering suddenly from a loping waltz to a mad march-- as if the tunes were breaking down and recovering in front of us. Guitarist Tanya Donelly's two Throwing Muses compositions contain similar sonic elements poured into a more melodic pop form and sung in her sweeter voice.

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CULT RECORD:DEAD CAN DANCE:"SPLEEN & IDEAL"

Dead Can Dance is the kind of artsy British band that American alternative rock purists revile. For years its U.S. following was synonymous with the "art-fag"--the kind of Anglophile who rushed out to buy the latest pricey, exquisitely packaged import from 4AD.Ironically, DCD eventually found itself another, much bigger audience, the mainstream, the constituency that buys world music, new age, and Gregorian chants.It makes sence. Mixing the chants with Middle Eastern, African, and Celtic textures, DCD weaves a post-modern tapestry out of pre-modern threads, fascinated by periods of history (the medieval era) and cultures (the third world) where there's no division between the secular and sacred, where everyday life is infused with ritual and meaning. Lisa Gerrard's voice is the piercing, ululating vibrato you hear throughout traditional music, the sound of women speaking to the spirits.Gerrard and partner Brendan Perry moved from Australia to London in the early '80s. Taking its title from Baudelaire, Spleen and Ideal is the flowering of all Dead Can Dance's Late Romantic obsessions with orientalism, medievalism, and arcana.With its liturgical feel and a timpani that resounds like God's own fist, "De Profundis" oozes stern religiosity, while the serpentine "Mesmerism" is the closest DCD gets to a pop song.

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