Throwing Muses are once again reunited for a brief tour. They stopped at the Middle East over the weekend. We weren't able to make it this time as we're happily in money saving mode and are putting live music on the back burner for a while (with one exception later this month).

My love for this band cannot be understated. To me there is Rush, then Throwing Muses, then everyone else. I've been lucky enough to see them a few times and each show holds a special place in my memory. I saw them in '89 (yes I am old) at Great Woods opening for R.E.M. and my rocker friends still look at me funny for being so into them then. I saw them for free at the Hatch Shell in '95. I saw them twice the day their Limbo album was release. Once at an in-store at Newbury Comics in Harvard Square (my copy of limbo was duly autographed) and then later at the Middle East. I saw them a year later on what was more or less their farewell tour. They all sat down on stage and played requests all night. It was an amazing show. I then saw them a couple of years ago on their previous short reunion tour. Just a fantastic night.

(I took lots of pics)


The following (along with the picture at the top of the post) is copied from this Boston.com review of the show.

Staying in touch with her Muses

Kristin Hersh performed with the Throwing Muses and 50 Foot Wave on Saturday.

CAMBRIDGE - Never mind that Throwing Muses originally formed in Newport, R.I., more than 25 years ago with a different lineup before settling into its latest configuration as a trio. Boston (and Cambridge for that matter) has long claimed the mercurial indie-rock icons as their own, and Saturday night, a sold-out crowd packed the big room at the Middle East to welcome back some old friends who'd been away awhile.

It's been six years since the last Muses album (word is they've got a new one due out next year), but you would never have known it from the band's majestically brooding, viscerally arresting performance - a 90-minute whirlpool of dark dreams, darker nightmares, and poisonous beauty, with frontwoman Kristin Hersh's voice at its vortex. It was a voice as sour as vinegar and venomous as strychnine - wickedly narrow in range, but labyrinthine in its ability to coil around the Muses' baleful melodies.

From the first coalescing guitar notes of "Devil's Roof," whose opening moved from pensive and almost psychedelically pretty into a measured groove of stealth and sinew, Hersh and Co. - namely, bassist Bernard Georges and drummer David Narcizo - proved as bracingly magnificent as ever. A clutch of cool, strangely glittering selections - "Start," "Hazing," and "Shimmer" - from one of the band's best albums, 1995's "University," followed (another, the full-blooded and furious "Bright Yellow Gun," would come later).

Ultimately, coupled with Georges's and Narcizo's dense yet elastic sense of rhythmic thrust and predilection for off-kilter time signatures, the set - drawn from various stages of the band's career and catalog, and spiked with two encores - offered potent proof of Hersh's enduring, enigmatic power as a singer and songwriter. Her penchant for throwing her demons, as well as muses, into a stormy sky and letting the rain come remains undiminished, and at age 42 she continues to sound like no one else.

There also aren't many artists who can open for themselves, convincingly or otherwise, but that's exactly what Hersh did with her noisy punk outfit 50 Foot Wave. Also a trio, with Georges on bass but with Rob Ahlers on drums, 50 Foot Wave did not sound like a side project or Hersh's new main muse, but rather something of a malevolent alter ego.

The songs? More like fiery blasts of corrosive energy, really: Hersh's shredded screams, metallic guitar chords, and vicious stop-start rhythms felt like a Band-Aid being ripped from a fresh wound, and taking some skin with it. Its 30-minute set, sandwiched between the, er, headliners and kinetic openers Screaming Females (also a female-fronted trio, this time from New Jersey) was all about finding pure release.
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

Now... did some one mention an album next year?