POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Typically Odd Delights From Throwing Muses

There is no such thing as a casual Throwing Muses fan, as Kristin Hersh knows.

“We only have one more (song), so those of you whose dates aren’t clapping don’t have to worry,” Hersh quipped Saturday night before closing her band’s Coach House concert with “Pearl,” a typically off-kilter number full of oblique symbolism and musical shifts between Appalachian folk-strumming, driving rock and a stretch of brooding, Doors-like instrumental exploration.

Some tag-alongs in the half-capacity house may have squirmed and wished they were hearing something less demanding, but the 85-minute show offered the atypical pleasures to which the cult of Throwing Muses fans has grown accustomed since the band emerged from Rhode Island 10 years ago.

Few bands from the days when the term “alternative rock” had real meaning have been more influential than Throwing Muses. What R.E.M. did for neo-Byrdsy jangling and neo-Stooges garage rock, what Sonic Youth did for noise-guitars, what Husker Du did for pop-in-a-maelstrom, Throwing Muses did for two now-widespread strains of female rock performance.

The girlish, airy contingent (Sundays, Juliana Hatfield, Veruca Salt et al) can look to Tanya Donelly, who was Hersh’s second-fiddle sidekick before striking out on her own in 1992 as leader of the more-accessible Belly. Hersh, 28, stands as the alternative set’s intense mama of psychodrama, having gotten a long head start on Courtney Love and the L7 sisters when it comes to barking, hollering and other aggressive maneuvers meant to embody extremes of psychic discombobulation.

“Vicky’s Box,” the only song culled Saturday from the band’s landmark debut album, “Throwing Muses,” embodied Hersh’s power to take raw emotion to the brink. (The vast majority of the 22-song concert was given to songs from the band’s three ‘90s albums, including the new “University,” which holds up well in a solid career discography of seven albums--including Hersh’s solo “Hips and Makers”--and two EPs).

Where Love’s howling is extroverted, declarative, and cathartic, Hersh’s muse--even when it makes her gargle and scream like a mad, damaged crone--has an inward, half-concealed meaning that makes it necessary for a listener to reach out, pondering symbols for clues, trying to get into the roiling flow of a streaming, usually troubled consciousness.

No matter how oblique and difficult, Hersh’s lyrics matter a great deal to the Muses. They were buried Saturday night in a turbulent sound mix (thickened by a keyboard player who joined the core trio of Hersh, drummer and co-founder David Narcizo, and bassist Bernard Georges). That made it harder to find one’s way to that inward place required for a full appreciation of the band.

Also missed were the superb harmonies that Hersh overdubs on record, giving her music a pop allure that in concert gave way to dense textures and an overt rock edge.

Narcizo was the dominant player for the muscular live Muses. His drumming was as hard and sharp as a lashing, but the playing was consistently attuned to the range of tonal colors that a set of skins and cymbals presents. A lead drummer goes only so far, though; Hersh’s guitar work usually was part of the sonic layering, rather than a consistent focal point, and the real focal point should have been her voice.

Touring as a solo acoustic act last year after the release of her solo album, Hersh surprised everybody by proving to be a winning, highly personable between-songs raconteur. Not much of her gift for charming, humorous gab rubbed off in the band context, as she limited herself to quiet, terse “thank you’s” and, as the show wore on, a few wry, cheerful observations on the theme of snake eradication (snakes being a sexual image in several of her songs).

Highlights included a number of good offerings from “University”: “Bright Yellow Gun,” a hooky, musically straightforward pop-rock pleaser; the swirling, oceanic “Flood,” in which Hersh’s urgent, yearning voice traced graceful arcs, and “Snakeface,” a sensuous number that brought in an almost funky groove. The touching slog-march “Two-Step,” from the excellent 1991 release “The Real Ramona,” evoked wearying trials borne with dignity.

When grunge kids and pop-punkers come to seek something that rocks in more complex ways, when Liz Phair fans and Hole-diggers crave a more artfully elusive evocation of emotional rawness and unvarnished sexuality, the Muses will be there, as they have been for 10 years, a band giving substance and meaning to that poor, abused word “alternative.”

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Four utterly unremarkable-seeming fellows from Cincinnati comprise the Ass Ponys, the opening band whose occasionally remarkable songs deserve more panache than the players could muster on stage.

In such tunes as “Little Bastard” and the brilliant “Peanut ‘93,” singer Chuck Cleaver has created some of rock’s best reflections on childhood. With flawless economy, he captures with realism, poignancy and wit what it’s like to be a certain kind of hard-pressed kid, spending the cusp between childhood and adolescence wandering along railroad tracks and river banks.

If Cleaver and his mates could invest their mid-tempo, rough-hewn, country-leaning rock songs with the confident flair of the similar-sounding Cracker--or with the grand theatricality of Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, a fellow Ohioan whose high, stringy delivery Cleaver sometimes echoes--the Ass Ponys would turn from workaday nags into rock thoroughbreds.