Throwing Muses

w/Audio Learning

Center

Mon May 12, Graceland,

10 pm, $17.50 adv.

The good news is there's a new Throwing Muses record out in stores, their first since 1996's Limbo. The better news is that the new record sounds like the rough, rawboned Muses of old, before records like The Real Ramona and University smoothed out the band's frayed edges. Both of those albums are pop masterpieces, but as most hardcore Throwing Muses fans will tell you, pop is about the furthest thing from the music the band started out making on records like House Tornado and their self-titled debut, albums on which head Muse Kristin Hersh channeled streams of unchartable inner chaos while the band whirled like punk rock dervishes around her. The new record is also called Throwing Muses, perhaps as a self-homage, or a reference to the return of their old style. Or maybe it's just their way of letting people know they still exist.

"We'd been planning on someday getting a lot of money," Hersh laughs, on the phone from New York City, where Throwing Muses are rehearsing for their first tour in more than five years. "We were working the 'windfall' option, like a rich fan would die and leave us all of their money. Or one of us would win the lottery and we'd make a new record, because we never actually split, we just didn't have the funds to be in the studio or on tour. So we still considered ourselves a band, even though we were essentially dead."

For Throwing Muses, however, being "essentially dead" meant being essentially like a lot of other bands.

"We've been playing out every year," Hersh explains. "We would tell the fans on the website what city we were going to be in and they'd meet us there. They'd come from like Norway, which was great, but every time we looked down at the set list, it was even older than it was at the last show. That made us depressed. It made us feel like dinosaurs instead of a working band, which is pretty much what we were."

And so it came time for Hersh, who has released a battery of solo records since the Muses' quasi demise (including the brand-new The Grotto), to come up with some new material for her old band. The funny part is that she already had.

"I had all these songs that I thought were bad," says Hersh, "because when I tried to put them on a solo record, they sounded stupid to me. And my husband was playing a CD of all these solo songs and he said, 'These songs aren't stupid, you're still writing for your dead band.' And he was right."

So Hersh sent a CD to David Narcizo and Bernard Georges, her erstwhile rhythm section, along with a bag of Trader Joe's cookies for Georges.

"He e-mailed me within hours of receiving his package and said, 'Cookie crumbs are flying everywhere, I'm playing air guitar and dancing around the room. We have to make a record.' So the imperative was there."

Hersh laughs again. She laughs a lot, actually. Given the tempestuous vibe of her music, it's kind of surprising to hear how genial, genuine, and sweet Kristin Hersh is in person (by phone anyway). Maybe it's because after weathering the swerves of an unpredictable life in music, she finds herself with a family, a solo career, and, once again, a killer rock band firing on all cylinders. Or maybe she's just patient.

Unlike the last few Muses works, the new record was made quickly, "and necessarily so, because David and Bernard have day jobs," Hersh explains. "But now I wish we'd always recorded that way because it sounds to me like a definitive album."

Does that mean she believes that past Muses efforts suffered from overthink? "Well, if you have the money," Hersh offers, "you tend to stay in the studio until the money runs out. At least we did. We felt guilty if we didn't. And so production becomes another instrument, and that's okay. It can mean that [the record] becomes overstylized and it feels dated in a few years, but it can still be charming. We've made records where at 4:00 a.m., we'd be standing on the pool table playing the chandelier with forks. Literally. So, it was time we climbed out of our own asses, anyway."

Throwing Muses also plays Mon May 12, Easy Street Records (Queen Anne), 6 pm, all ages, free.

sean@thestranger.com