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Thursday, 16 January 2025

Summer Of Love

My friend Spencer sends me music fairly regularly and often things I'd missed or hadn't heard for years. Recently he sent me a link to a new single by Throwing Muses, a new song called Summer Of Love, from an album coming in March titled Moonlight Concessions. Summer Of Love's lyric deals with a wager Kristen Hersch made with a man for a dollar around the idea that the seasons don't change us. The bet was lost. Kirsten says the man said, 'we aren't just planted here, stagnant, we're in flux, responding to love like octopuses moving across the ocean floor'. 'Turns out here was right' , she adds, 'and I still owe him a buck'. 

Throwing Muses never really went for the obvious with the words or music. Summer Of Love is three minutes of off kilter acoustic guitar and hushed vocals, cello and a noisy guitar solo, leftfield indie- Americana with a brooding, baroque feel. 

I don't think I even knew they'd reformed. released an album in 2003, one in 2013 with Tanya Donelly back in the fold and then another in 2020. I haven't been paying attention obviously. I'm not sure I've even thought about Throwing Muses for a very long time. The first album I bought by them was Hunkpapa back in 1989, the band's third. It came out on 4AD and in 1989 anything on 4AD was worth listening to. The artwork alone was worth the price of admission but also in '89 Pixies had released two essential albums in a year with 4AD and there were albums from Pale Saints, Ultra Vivid Scene and Lush in the same year. The consensus now seems to be that Hunkpapa smoothed off some of the rough edges that the group's previous two albums contained but I remember thinking Hunkpapa was really good at the time. The lead single from it was Dizzy, classic late 80s Ameri- indie, catchy folk- pop with a snarl and a endlessly circling guitar riff. 

Two years later they came back with The Real Ramona, an album I still have on vinyl- I took it out last night. It's still in really good condition and possibly hasn't been played since 1991. The single Counting Backwards preceded it, another catchy, off kilter song from Kirsten Hersh who had a pretty singular world view. Throwing Muses pitched up at BBC2's The Late Show in March '91, a programme that mixed culture arts and politics and had a slew of great bands playing live. They played two songs, Counting Backwards and Two Step, and show what a good live band they were. 





1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I saw them at The International in March 1991, and was chuffed when I got home that night to see them on The Late Show.
The Real Ramona still gets heavy rotation in this house.
Darren