The problem with being an institution is that people expect you to behave like one.
Throwing Muses originally got together nearly forty years ago, have been reformed for nearly twenty, and present members Bernard Georges, David Narcizo and Kristin Hersh have all been there since more or less the beginning.
Not that their output has been so industrious since the hiatus ended in 2003; their tenth album, Sun Racket, follows its predecessor – the staccato and gnarly Purgatory/Paradise – more than six years further down the line. Maybe the expectation then was to produce something easily digestible as a veteran rock band should do, but instead the eventual project spanned a gargantuan near-seventy minutes runtime, and also jumped formats into a book, the soundscape oscillating between minute bursts and more trad lengths.
For casual observers hoping to reminisce about the trio’s brief post-grunge imperial phase, this wasn’t how the institution who’d made The Real Ramona and Red Heaven should be behaving.
That guy/girl will be happier with Sun Racket’s relative orthodoxy, what feels like a better curated attempt at reorientation around the basics courtesy of ten songs that place power and economy of movement over (as they would see it) art for art’s sake. A theme is water, although opener Dark Blue is liquid in title only, instead a classic Muses pivot back to brooding rock; Hersh’s rasp, along with the singer’s lysergic poetry, as indecipherable as ever (‘And you can shout about what coming down I cried about/a freak suspended animation’).
Hersh has spoken about the process being one of letting the music guide them, revealing: ‘All it asked of us was to co-mingle two completely disparate sonic vocabularies: one heavy noise, the other delicate music box. Turns out we didn’t have to do much.’ Not that a primer is really needed. On Bo Diddley Bridge, the oblique power always within their reach sways from sea to sky, a desultory piano line accompanying Hersh’s chant of, ‘The dream’s collapsing’, while the caustic punk of St. Charles threatens to eclipse both nothing and everything.
Quiet and loud, that was the motif, and Milk At McDonald’s is quiet, a hazy undertone that looks at the bad and the good and comes out smiling. Is the wisdom always conventional? Well, the best moments here are all far towards the end, invested listeners getting the luscious boogie of Frosting, Kay Catherine’s punctured Americana and, on closer Sue’s, chastened, unremorseful tokens of how in other lives things used to be.
That’s the thing about institutions, people expect them to act in a certain way. But when you’re an institution that likes nothing more than to have patterns only you can interpret, that’s when albums like Sun Racket are made, reliably threading a needle most can’t even hear.