If ever there's a record that deserves a second chance it's Crooked. The 2010 album from Kristin Hersh is going to be reissued on vinyl, CD, and digital formats via Fire Records on Friday, and it still surprises. With everything written, performed, and produced by the Throwing Muses legend herself, the release remains one with potent force, and an almost primordial fury percolating under the tunes.
Offered up here in a new running order, Crooked remains an album of roiling rhythms, from the space funk buried in the veins of "Mississippi Kite" to string-soaked "Glass", a number with a real post-punk vibe about it. Kristin Hersh is a master of the tempo change, of course, as any fan who cherishes Throwing Muses (1986) like me will tell you. And here on Crooked, the shifting moods of "Fortune" still haunt, as do the waves of instrumentation that briefly threaten to subsume "Sand", one of Hersh's best compositions here.
Crooked remains an unsettling record, one punctuated by the flashes of the sort of Zeppelin-esque rhythmic hooks that would show up years later on her more recent solo releases. If "Krait", for instance, sounds like a bridge between her earlier solo compositions and her rougher stuff later, the cut is, like many here, reasonably concise. Hersh always possessed a fiery streak in her songwriting, but it was one which she could harness in the service of tunes that were then ones that only sounded like they were about to go off the rails, with Hersh guiding things along with focus and steely instrumental prowess.
Crooked is out on Friday via Fire Records.
More details on Kristin Hersh via KristinHersh.com.
[Photo: Fire Records]