Muses’ Hard and Heavy Rock Doesn’t Drag

The proliferation of bands that play it hard, dark and heavy--the Seattle way--doesn’t seem to be abating.

But for Throwing Muses--which certainly played it hard, dark and heavy Tuesday night at Bogart’s--the move toward a tougher, more elemental sound didn’t begin the day after MTV jumped on “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Throwing Muses, a band from Rhode Island led by Kristin Hersh, has been making records since 1986 and getting brawnier as it goes along. If a new album, “Red Heaven,” and a new lineup, reduced from a foursome to a trio, have brought Throwing Muses more in line with what’s hot, Hersh’s singular voice and her unaffectedly intense presence in concert have kept the band from ever seeming bandwagonesque. No need to rename it Kristin in Chains just yet.

As if to point out that dark-and-heavy didn’t begin with Sub Pop (the small Seattle record label mainly responsible for launching today’s sound of disaffected young America), the Muses opened Tuesday’s set with a crunching instrumental tromp through Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression.”

Hersh didn’t even try to mimic Hendrix on guitar, but the song did introduce a heavy-hitting rhythm concept that makes drummer David Narcizo the band’s instrumental focus. It was fitting that Narcizo occupied a front-and-center spot on stage, with Hersh singing from one flank and new bassist Bernard Georges booming authoritatively from another.

“Manic Depression” also sounded a thematic keynote. For the ensuing hour, Hersh sang fragmented songs about the emotional fragging that goes on when relationships turn raw. Song titles such as “Fear,” “Furious” and “Hate My Way” can serve as a good barometer of the show’s emotional tenor.

Hersh’s oblique lyrics (none so oblique as her newest batch of songs) hinted at rejections, humiliations and retaliations, and her performance projected these often puzzling shards of verbiage onto a big screen where the underlying feelings were unmistakable. Even at her calmest and most moderate, her voice was fraught with tension, incipient alarm or a nervous weariness. In gripping moments when the heat of feeling turned explosive, her gargling, keening and yelping registered palpable distress, verging on madness.

Rock these days has too many singers plumbing dark themes and angling with histrionics for the title of little miss (or mister) queen of darkness (“Little Miss Queen of Darkness” being the name of a still-apt Kinks oldie that nicely satirized black-clad poseurs of the ‘60s). Hersh didn’t try to milk her dark themes for glamour, not for a second. She was nearly immobile during the concert, eyes fixed in the distance, as if the scenarios in her songs were being played out on the room’s back wall. In her concentrated bearing was an invitation to fans not to dwell on image and showmanship, but to conjure mental pictures of their own.

But Hersh also showed enjoyment. Sometimes, with her round, pink face and bud mouth, she had the expectant, almost beatific look of Ingmar Bergman’s daughter waiting for the curtain to rise on “The Magic Flute.” She spoke minimally, accepting applause with smiles and saving the broadest grin for a moment after the band hit a hammering peak during one of the Muses’ most emotionally devastated numbers.

In the past, Tanya Donelly, the Muses’ former lead guitarist, served as a more pop-minded contrast to Hersh, taking the lead for two or three songs per set. Having left the band last year, Donelly is applying her catchy but skewed sensibility and alluring, airy-but-not-dainty voice in her own band, Belly. There were a few moments Tuesday when her talents were missed.

Her harmonies would have added something to the sadly lyrical passages of the brilliant, episodic “Hate My Way,” and some of the hypnotic instrumental segments anchored by Hersh’s circling rhythm patterns could have benefited from a snaking, lead melody line. Still, for the most part, the pounding power generated by Narcizo and Georges, combined with occasional edgy lead guitar riffs from Hersh, gave Throwing Muses a persuasively full sound. The band has never rocked better.

It found an intelligent framework for all that wattage. Muses songs tend not to offer resolutions to the painful quandaries they project, but the concert as a whole offered a sense of progression, finally moving toward a harrowing, martial-cadenced blowup that featured the band’s most searing playing. After that, “Two Step,” a graceful, weary elegy, closed the set, suggesting that even in defeat there’s some dignity to be derived from this whole frustratingly messy enterprise of emotional investment that leaves us so vulnerable and exposed to loss.

The first encore’s songs, “Pearl” and “Bea,” returned to troubled scenarios. Then Hersh ended the night with a dramatic solo performance of “Delicate Cutters,” in which horrible images of rolling heads alternated with glimmers (albeit muted ones) of hopeful possibility.

The two opening bands, Barenaked Ladies and 7 Deadly 5, were an oddly lighthearted couple to be keeping company with Throwing Muses, but they were welcome and well-received.

Barenaked Ladies, rookie Sire Records label-mates of Throwing Muses, devoted its half-hour mainly to frolic. The festivities took on many musical hues.

There was the funky, piano-driven (if politically impotent) version of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” and a concluding joke number in which these five white Canadian rockers, three of them with chunky couch-potato builds, enthusiastically and not altogether ineptly emulated the line-dance moves of a hip-hop dance crew. While they danced, they managed to carry on a spoof medley that set snippets of recent hits such as “Jump” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” against a human beat-box thud.

These were no rappers, though, but highly melodic alternative rockers capable of playing and singing with flair--and with a serious bent to go with their prevailing jaunty tendencies. Singer Steven Page mustered enough earnest folk-pop fervor during “What a Good Boy” to make you wonder whether Tracy Chapman might turn up to join him in a duet.

On its new album, “Gordon,” Barenaked Ladies’ combination of ironic, pop-insider humor and Morrissey-like sensitivity can grow cloying, and its craftsmanship, recalling such other highly melodic, often ironic college-rock contenders as the JudyBats and the Beautiful South, can grow too polished. Live, the band’s unstoppable urge to have a good time proved infectious.

The 7 Deadly 5 took an ironic slant on relationships. Dan McGough (pronounced McGoo), an old buddy and keyboard sideman of the Pontiac Brothers, has a scrunched, scratchy, nasal voice that falls somewhere between Dan Stewart of Green on Red and David Lowery, the former Camper Van Beethoven and now Cracker front-man. McGough’s impish look and solid, playful keyboard work were engaging but his wise-guy’s whine would have gone down better in smaller doses.

7 Deadly 5’s instrumental charms kept things interesting, with Mike Sessa, another Orange County rock veteran, driving the band solidly on drums, and guitarist Max Ferguson throwing in hints of Marc Ribot-style dissonance to help keep the roots-based sound fresh. Bassist Eileen Markell proved a good, underused foil for McGough when she sang a countrified number, “Memphis,” bringing to it a detached melancholy that recalled Sally Timms of the Mekons.