If Lilith Fair had taken its cue from this album rather than Sarah McLachlan's early work, then we'd be living in paradise, perhaps. Alas for cruel fate and its many tricks.
The thing about Hersh is that I got into this first well before I finally got around to listening to Throwing Muses, and the further thing is that I still like her better solo. I think it's because…well, I don't know, really. It's very hard to say. And to an extent that's part of the strange, wonderful appeal of this album in particular, because it's so wonderfully allusive and elusive all at once. I'm still not entirely sure what's going on.
Of course, on the face of it such things are clear. Hersh, on acoustic guitar and piano, with Jane Scarpantoni on cello pretty much throughout and on one song Tom's favorite liberal patrician on backing vocals (and doing quite a good job at that). Not much to immediately add to this on the technical front. All nicely underplayed as well, like on the waltz-time "Beestung," a keyboard figure played and changed slightly as it goes, strings appearing from time to time, a neat chamber waltz.
But what makes it more than that is that it's not just a neat chamber waltz. Something in Hersh's voice is much more than simply providing background ornament. Everyone and their mother likes to point to her history of mental illness as providing the explanation for it all, but I'm not anxious to push the biographical fallacy (though I do love the biographical "Houdini Blues," up in the Appalachians, down in wells). A certain distancing, yes, but that's all I'll accept, because it's all you need, really. It's partially why there can be lines like "This hairdo's truly evil, I'm not sure it's mine" on "Teeth," nothing but acoustic guitar plucking and her voice and a bit of echo.
And the music isn't just simply strum and sing either. There's the way "Sundrops" spirals up with a brilliant opening start, guitar and cello building and building and then continuing the momentum into the song, or the way "Me and My Charms" just grabs you with such a lovely opening, quietly captivating, or how "A Loom," especially, fragments along with the lyrics; right when everything gets to be a little too much, her calls mixing with the chorus, it stops…then gets just pretty enough. But only just enough.
"I'm gonna cry you look for me love Kristin P.S. keep them coming" she sings at the end of the fragile, barely-there "The Letter." Which she has, happily.