The cello-laced "Summer of Love", the opener to the new Throwing Muses album, isn't chamber rock. Tracing an uneasy forward/backward pattern, the cut indicates just how intimate and modestly unsettling the rest of Moonlight Concessions is going to be.
On this record, Kristin Hersh favors a semi-claustrophic vibe. "South Coast" finds her voice riding atop massed acoustic guitars and a skittering cello-line, while the languid "Theremini" stretches out in the Southern sun. The track is, like so many that have flowed from the pen of Hersh, both beautiful and unsettling in equal measure.
The best material here, like "Libretto" to use one example, finds Kristin Hersh at the peak of her game again, though the material is perhaps less obviously emotional. Over the course of more than four decades, Hersh with Throwing Muses has found a channel for her obsessions. The songs here on Moonlight Concessions don't roar like those on the first record, for example, but they strike at the same part of the psyche. Hersh's voice is still a wildly effective weapon, whether it's the impassioned yelps of the past, or the modulated attack of 2025's Muses machine. Moonlight Concessions is not so much a new chapter, but rather the flip-side of the coin tossed skyward with the first TM record.
Moonlight Concessions by Throwing Muses is out on Friday via Fire Records.
[Photo: Fred Abong / Fire Records]