Kristin Hersh Unleases Angst With a Smile

Kristin Hersh’s songs can give you a lonely, sometimes desperate feeling, as if all your defenses could be washed away on her mournful waves of acoustic guitar and plaintive, keening vocal contortions. But if you listened closely during her solo performance Wednesday at the Knitting Factory Hollywood, you found resilient humor in her words.

For an hour and 15 minutes, the singer-songwriter and former leader of alternative-rock darlings Throwing Muses sat on a gaudy floral-print love seat, leavening the romantic and philosophical angst with wry twists in her lyrics and lighthearted chatting between numbers. The set highlighted new, unreleased tunes, but some of the finer moments featured such early solo works as “Me and My Charms” and the Muses’ “Bea.”

Hersh strummed an array of rhythmic, bluesy-folky riffs, evoking traditional and alternative styles, marking time with her trademark upper-body wobble. Staring intently at some far-off point, she yawped about the pain of jealousy and unrequited desire, and offered more uplifting sentiments in such tunes as “Spring.”

Her vivid poetry could simultaneously carry a sexual charge, a bitter accusation and a cutting mockery, but Hersh was never self-pitying. Still, her enigmatic wordplay sometimes seemed a form of self-protection. Such oblique communication would be nightmarish if you actually had to live with it, but as art it was quite satisfying.