Throwing Muses Inspired Beyond Gender and Genre

With the emergence of distinctive new female voices like Tracy Chapman and Sinead O’Connor, “Women in Rock” is a hot trend story once again.

But Kristin Hersh of the New England-based Throwing Muses isn’t trying to jump on the bandwagon--even though the presence of three women (plus a male drummer) in her band gives the Muses superiority of numbers.

“I’m glad there are a lot of women (winning recognition as rockers),” Hersh said in a recent phone interview from her home in Newport, R.I. “I hope they soon can stop calling them ‘women in rock’ and just say they’re people in rock.

“It seems like a lot of female musicians try to become very masculine, as if rock is a male-oriented business or phenomenon. They try to be as tough as possible, imitating men. The other direction is to become sex kittens, which is pointed at men, too. I wouldn’t know how to do either of them.”

The music that Hersh has made as Throwing Muses’ main singer and songwriter is too personal, and far too elusive, to define in terms of gender or genre.

Ask Hersh, a former philosophy and literature student, where her swirling, darting, darkly impressionistic songs come from, and she’ll give the same answer that ancient playwrights and poets gave: She invokes the Muse.

Throwing Muses, who make their Los Angeles debut with shows tonight at Bogart’s and Friday and Saturday at Club Lingerie, are serious about the classical belief that artistic creativity depends on the intervention of mysterious agencies, personified as the Muses.

“I never approached songwriting purely through craft,” said Hersh, 21, who started writing songs at 14 with school chum Tanya Donelly (the two became stepsisters after starting Throwing Muses). “I had to learn to be pushed around by the music, instead of me pushing the music around.”

The resulting songs are shifting, troubled internal landscapes, where symbol-laden lyrics course along a jagged stream of consciousness. The music mirrors those shifts, oscillating between alarmed clangor and gentle lyricism.

Atop it all, Hersh and Donelly apply their vocals, an unorthodox brew that includes harsh cackles, nervous tremors and ethereal arias. When it works, which has been quite often on the band’s two albums and two EPs, there is enough pop enticement to capture a listener for the repeated listenings required for Hersh’s symbols and images to connect.

Hersh, Donelly (a less prolific writer who has contributed some strong songs to the band) and drummer David Narcizo are longtime friends who went through grade school and high school together in Newport.

Bassist Leslie Langston, a transplanted San Franciscan, joined them in 1985. A year later, the adventurous British independent label, 4AD, signed Throwing Muses on the strength of an unsolicited tape.

The band’s 1986 debut album, “Throwing Muses”--hailed by England’s Melody Maker as “the finest debut” of the ‘80s but still available only as an import--dealt in harrowing terms with adolescent pain and humiliation. The new “House Tornado” album (which follows last year’s American debut EP, “The Fat Skier”) takes a somewhat more measured, but still edgy, approach.

Hersh, now married and the mother of a 2-year-old son named Dylan, explores conflicting impulses that arise in a relationship: the need for freedom and the yearning for commitment.

“Basically, I’m not as crazy as I was then,” Hersh said of the difference in tone between the first album, written in her teens, and “House Tornado,” written after she had experienced motherhood and applause for her music.

The music on the first LP was written, Hersh said, when she thought she “was on the way to being institutionalized, so I (could) spit out whatever I wanted. Now I can’t go crazy. The band is a lot of people, and their livelihood depends on this music. Now it’s on the way to having a career and raising a child. Dylan is a boy, and he has to become a man, and that’s my job.”