Pop Review : Hersh Finds Home at Coach House

There is no denying Kristin Hersh’s bona fides in the alternative rock universe.

Whether edgy and electric with her band, Throwing Muses, or quietly intimate on her recent acoustic solo debut, “Hips and Makers,” she has never been less than intense while plugging into the emotional currents that flow through troubled homes and tormented minds.

But the prospect of Hersh playing solo-acoustic, as she did Friday at the Coach House, seemed a little daunting. In fronting Throwing Muses since the mid-1980s, she has been an austere figure, caught up in the psychodramas of her songs and not one for the audience-engagement that is virtually essential for a rewarding solo concert.

Given her heavy subject matter, and the fact that her symbolic, fragmentary lyrics typically render literal meanings obscure (even as her performances make vivid the feelings underlying them), an evening of unadorned Hersh songs held great potential for claustrophobia.

As it turned out, there was no need to worry. Hersh the singer-guitarist was as intense as ever, but Hersh the hostess proved to be a spontaneous and richly comic raconteur who gave the show the lighter dimension it needed to succeed.

She spun imaginative tall tales, made wry observations about life in the music business, and thoroughly charmed her fans with warm, funny stories about her 2-year-old son, Ryder, that struck a perfect balance between the affections of a doting mom and the crusty humor of someone who isn’t about to sentimentalize what it’s like to be the parent of a terrible-2.

In short, Hersh took advantage of the intimate format to open up in a direct, disarming way that gave her performance an entirely new dimension. At the same time, it reassured an audience that, faced with the starkness of her songs and the feelings in them, might otherwise have felt as if it were intruding in touchy precincts where it didn’t belong.

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Hersh didn’t pull any emotional punches. Her 16-song set drew heavily upon “Hips and Makers” but also encompassed some Muses material, including a couple of obscure B-sides and one new song, “Gazebo Tree.” The husky crone’s-bark of alarm, the small, nervous tremor of isolation, the insistent call of yearning, the weary, diminished voice of one put too many times through the wringer--all of Hersh’s vivid devices for translating raw feeling into song--were in effect.

She supported them with precise, attentive guitar playing that maintained interest with unorthodox chord patterns, well-executed single-note lines, and passages that showed an assured touch with traditional, Appalachian-style folk-guitar picking.

The entire set held the audience of about 200 in rapt attention, but it could have benefited from more diversity of musical mood and color. Hersh’s extensive catalogue doesn’t offer many instances of lighthearted good-feeling, but she can draw on many strong songs with surging rhythms or purely lovely melodies--two ways of introducing more variety.

Hersh gave fine renderings of such “Hips and Makers” highlights as the gutsy, powerful declaration “Me and My Charms” and the darkly meditative “Your Ghost.” But she omitted the airy “Bee-stung” and the dreamy “Velvet Days,” two alluring “Hips and Makers” songs that could have lent some needed contrast. “Cottonmouth,” a wry, vigorous song in which sexual desire overrides the narrator’s better judgment about a man’s dubious character, drew the show’s strongest burst of applause, suggesting that the audience would have been grateful for a few more musical sallies out from the shadows.

Still, Hersh’s performance opened great new possibilities. Having made a respected name with a method based in uncompromising abstraction, perhaps she can now apply this previously hidden gift for engaging narrative storytelling to her songwriting. That might be a tad conventional for a Throwing Muse, but there is nothing more conventional than spiking somber material with the fizz of between-songs humor, the oldest trick in the solo-folkie book. Hersh honored it, with marvelous results.

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Opening act Pooka seemed at first glance like the last thing the rock world needs: two more shy, waif-like girl-singers applying airy, small voices to a litany of boyfriend problems. But the acoustic duo from Manchester, England, quickly revealed there is more to it than that.

In the course of their 40-minute set, Sharon Lewis and Natasha Jones coiled voices in expert close-harmony like a couple of Roches, projected some of the dizzy whimsicality of the ‘60s hippie folk duo, the Incredible String Band, and mustered some spine and bite, both in their occasional rocking rhythms (courtesy of Lewis, a solid guitarist) and a no-nonsense attitude toward matters of romance.

The set’s strongest song, “City Sick,” was a bluesy number that recalled Rod Stewart’s “Gasoline Alley” period.

The duo, named for a mischievous type of haunting spirit (James Stewart’s giant invisible rabbit buddy in “Harvey” is probably the world’s best-known pooka), recently released its debut album on Elektra Records. In their songs, Lewis and Jones were especially refreshing in their ability to be gently frank and open about sexual desire without resorting to shock-value tactics or seeming to be striving for some major declaration about the ascendancy of liberated women in rock.

Shy and awkward as they seemed, the two were hams at heart. Their unguarded reactions to such signs of approval as a bouquet of roses from a chivalrous gent in the audience were a big part of the set’s charm.

Given a shot, Pooka could be capable of drawing big, bright pooka dots on the fashionably sullen face of ‘90s rock.