250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 14 Throwing Muses - Throwing Muses

 

I bought this when it came out in 1986 and listened to it a lot. I was going through an incredible phase in my life. I was 21 and  terribly sick and so was my older  sister. I went into recovery. I couldn't open jars or peel potatoes or open windows  I looked weird. I lost confidence, I almost had hallucinations when I drank too much and it reacted ro the strong medication I was taking. It took me years to fully 'get back', 

I was constantly drenched in sweat. I wrote poems about living in an elephant's skin We were in a house with my parents and my sister. My sister meanwhile died. She went to the hospice.  We brought her home my mother tended her and she died. My mother went up one evening. We were watching television in the living room. 

My mother came downstairs said Sarah was dead and the four of us went upstairs held hands at the foot of the bed and said goodbye to our darling Sarah.  The experience changed me and has been something I and all of us have been coming to terms with ever since. But forty years later I'm alive and happy. I don't believe in living in the past and the one thing I absolutely know is that Sarah would not have wanted us to be unhappy. So I'm determined to honour her wishes  

And all the time through those years I was listening to this jagged, uncompromising record and not knowing really what I felt about it except that I liked ir. I'm listening to it now, I still like it. It was given incredible reviews. The band were compared to Joy Division and The Birthday Party. Kirsten Hersh the Throwing Muses leader had been knocked off her bike and her skull had been fractured in three places when the band were coming together at High School which skewed their happy go lucky trajectory and made them Sylvia Plath's for the mid Eighties alternative set. 

It's still an incredibly powerful album. There's self harm and threat in most songs. It's still not an album a mother would want to come into a room and hear her little darling listening to. There aren't conventional verse chorus structures. Or lyrics. Each song seems to have gear changes every fifteen seconds or so.. It's not the stuff of mass acceptance. A record destined for the margins though of course it gets Mojo retrospectives. A display in the Unorthodox Hall of Fame

It's melodic, colorful but self consciously unsettling. Disturbing and deceptive. Demanding further listening. I've been listening for forty years and I'm not quite sure what I think yet. The mark of a great record.