Product Description:
Throwing Muses: Kristin Hersh (vocals, guitar, piano); Tanya Donelly (vocals, guitar, percussion); Leslie Langston (bass, percussion, background vocals); David Nacizo (drums, percussion, background vocals).
Additional personnel: Rich Gilbert (slide guitar).
Recorded at Fort Apache Studios, North Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Throwing Muses' sophomore album HOUSE TORNADO builds on and focuses the wild, mercurial energy of their exceptional debut. Though the band's a bit more streamlined here, the music--given Kristen Hersh's unpredictable songs and part-angel/part-devil voice--still sounds like nothing else before or since. Jagged, shimmering, paranoid, and possessed of a hallucinatory beauty, Hersh's songs have a sorcerer's effect; listening to them feels like being wrapped in gauze, scratched with glass, and dropped into a particle accelerator all at once.
Though the band's sound would become heavier and more rock-oriented on later albums, on HOUSE TORNADO they still favor a clean, shimmering guitar sound that contrasts deliciously with thundering drums and Tanya Donelly's burbling bass. "Juno" almost sounds like a pop song, but the dreamy intensity of "Colder" and "Marriage Tree," or the surreal piano ballad "Walking In The Dark" attest to the Muses' defiantly individual standing. All told, this is an indie classic from one of the best and most underappreciated rock bands of the 1980s.
