Strange Angles

There's no polite way to say this, but it's nice to hear Kristin Hersh a little less insane. She's long said that songs write her as opposed to the other way around, and after listening to Sky Motel, her third solo record of original material, it's not surprising to learn that Hersh went about this record more traditionally -- starting from scratch as opposed to the sonic visions she used to get. The songs, while as skewed and circular as Hersh's songs have always been, lack that scary edge that a lot of Hips and Makers and Strange Angels had.

I always enjoyed Hersh's Throwing Muses work more than her solo records. The immediacy of the simple acoustic guitar and voice arrangements of Hips and Angles held those songs too close. This is a problem you can't imagine having with a Bob Mould solo-acoustic disc -- he's not crazy, he's just cranky, and hearing a song like "Hoover Dam" or "Changes" up close and personal opens another window to the material. Hersh's songs, though, are already so close, so edgy (not like a Tarantino imitator but like an itch that can't be scratched away), that you depend on more ornate arrangements for distance. On Hips and Angels there's nothing between you and the song. And as beautiful as some of them are, at times, it just got to be a little too . . . much.

(Let me be up front here and say that I'm perfectly willing to accept that this is my failing, not Hersh's. I may just not be man enough to take it.)

Sky Motel could very well be a low-key Muses record. Hersh plays most of the instruments, save for the odd drum track or loop, and she's fleshed out the songs much the same as she always has -- with lonely echoing lead guitar refrains, stop-start polyrhythmic riffs, the occasional blistering solo. She doesn't abandon her Limbo-era decree of avoiding overdriven guitar more than once or twice, so there's not a lot of fuzz to the record, just a lot of clean surfaces intersecting at strange angles.

Some of it's a little too clean. For much of the record Hersh has a real drum problem -- compressing the percussion into a tidy little strip, one with almost no bottom to it. It's exactly the opposite of what the Flaming Lips did on The Soft Bulletin, with its massive, almost preposterous drum lines, like you're standing in the middle of a wind tunnel. Sky Motel needs a little of the Lips' size -- only "Cathedral Heat," of the tracks with drums, has enough sonic depth.

This is a petty complaint, though. Even if a little shallow sounding, Sky Motel is terrific, long on craft and short on filler. Over and over again you're reminded how inventive a singer and guitarist Hersh can be -- she'll leap intervals and play refrains that couldn't look right on paper but make sense when she does them.

Even without her insane muse forcing songs on her, Hersh is at the top of her game. Like Mould, and maybe Juliana Hatfield, she's one of the few survivors of the original band of post-punks who heard the Sex Pistols and Television through hand-me-downs and older siblings. That generation doesn't really have a lot of past glories to recapture, and a lot of their success depends on how willing they are not necessarily to keep innovating, but to at least keep changing their approach. Hersh is smart enough to have figured this out -- instead of letting the songs come to her, she's going out and finding them.

ben@smug.com

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