O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Throwing a New Spin on Rock

It’s almost creepy the way rock continues to resurrect itself. Just when it seems that its structural confines--certainly limited compared to jazz or other music forms--have been filled to capacity, a Creedence, Pretenders or R.E.M. comes along to take the same old chords and beats and give them an entirely new spin.

While not quite working in the same league yet, Rhode Island’s Throwing Muses showed at the Coach House on Sunday that it most certainly is adept at reshaping rock in its own fashion. The group’s front line of Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donelly have been friends since they were 8; they learned to play guitar together, and their take on rock has an insular, quirky, private-language quality.

Without straying far from a simple rock framework, the quartet--filled by drummer David Narcizo and bassist Fred Abong--manages to torque that structure just enough to be jarring, and then embellishes it with unlikely hooks, unexpected dissonances, wild rhythmic lurches and a fearless vocal style.

Hersh’s lyrics often seem pulled from a dream state, or turn on deceptively simple phrases that resonate with deeper struggles. Most of Sunday’s set was drawn from the current “The Real Ramona” album, including “Counting Backwards” with its unsettling co-mingling of mental and physical states: “I build a tower in my bones, I spill the water through my hose.”

The album’s “Say Goodbye” catalogues the emotional luggage, both the essential and the crushingly ponderous, that weigh on a relationship. In just one line--”I brought this ball and chain for you / Don’t you wear it”--Hersh hints at the jealousies and fears that come with love, and at a deeper hope that the love won’t succumb to them. As bleak and abrasive as some of the songs are, most also wind on a thread of hope and perseverance.

Hersh most certainly is a persevering sort: She’s holding up to the rigors of the road while seven months pregnant--balancing a heavy Les Paul guitar over a globular stomach can’t be any too easy--and Sunday was working with a throat so sore that just listening to it made one want a cough drop.

Hersh’s ailing throat and a snare-heavy sound mix made it necessary Sunday to take much of the Muses lyrical intent on faith. Fortunately, like the early R.E.M., their music conveys those dreamscapes and mental churnings sufficiently well on its own.

Opening with the 1986 song “Soul Soldier,” with tempos lurching into interstellar overdrive and Donelly providing a rocketing slide guitar, the Muses set worked more from mood and atmosphere than from standard song structure. The current album’s “Two Step” proved a haunting, foggy lullaby, and Hersh’s wounded voice only added to the otherworldliness. “Golden Thing” was an unbridled abstraction of power pop, taking a Bo Diddley beat, filtering it through the Pretenders and sending it into the ozone.

Donelly’s “Not Soo Soon” also flirted with pop conventions, with all the melodic makings of a hit until she bounded into its wild cat-yowl chorus. Though Hersh supplies most of the Muses material, Donelly also is a strong writer, exemplified in the set’s beguiling “Honeychain,” which floated on a “Twin Peaks”-like bass figure until the guitars came spilling in with roiling cross-rhythms.

Nearly all of Donelly’s guitar work served the songs, bolstering them with atmospheric torrents of sound and shimmering little hooks. (In a distinctly feminine touch, she has taped over some of the letters on her Marshall amp, so it’s now named “Marsha”). Though Narcizo and Abong kept to their own corner of the stage, their rhythm work always wove in tightly with Donelly and Hersh’s two guitars.

The groups’s unified approach built to a harrowing conclusion in the encore “Hook in Her Head,” with Hersh, Narcizo and Abong churning through thick waters as Donelly coaxed layered sawings and howling feedback from her guitar, raising noise to a level of expression that the Jesus and Mary Chain might have achieved, had they but a shred of competence.

On a hit-and-miss basis, the opening Walkabouts, from Seattle, also have found a distinctive sound. At the best moments in its uneven set, the quintet seemed a bit like Leonard Cohen blended with Peter Case, with just a dollop of the thrash more typical of Seattle’s Sub Pop bands.

The group is fronted by singer/guitarists Carla Torgerson and Chris Eckman, and Torgerson appears to have the edge on populating the band’s songs with feeling. Her waltz-timed “Deep Water,” which reminded one a bit of the late British balladeer Sandy Denny, and a rampaging group workout on a Pogue-ish arrangement of “Mystery Train” warrant keeping an eye on the band.

CHRISTINE COTTER / Los Angeles Times