Kristin Hersh - Wyatt at the Coyote Palace

Drowned In Sound 90

The whole release comprises two CDs and a book, where the lyrics for each song are printed alongside an anecdote, normally one wherein Hersh narrowly escapes death, sometimes accompanied by an image. While reading and listening at the same time can occasionally get a bit much in terms of how much stuff there is to take in, the music of the album sets the tone for the book so beautifully, so perfectly, that it’s worth it and more. Musically it's about as Kristin-Hersh-solo-work as it could get, and at its best at that, made up of layered acoustic guitars playing chord sequences and melodies that move seamlessly between bizarre and accessible, combining the two in a way that needs to be heard to be believed. With her raspy voice over the top, it has that sense of earthiness that feels just a little magical, painting images and evoking sensations that feel weirdly reminiscent of this scene in The Craft.

Because there’s a pervading sense of wonder at the world that might border on a sense of mysticism, but only because reality seems so overwhelmingly amazing. With her acoustic guitars she paints in pinky reds and oranges and warm, earthy greens, and her lyrics zoom in on the natural aspects of her stories of near death, augmented by her occasional use of field recordings. This wonder at life, reality, the world, seems as much the point of the central theme of death as the morbid contemplation of death itself; indeed, as her son Wyatt puts it in the story accompanying ‘Shotgun’, “crossing the threshold and starting a new life”; they are considered two sides of the same coin.

Her lyrics maintain throughout the album a sense of abstractness, yet reading the accompanying anecdote doesn’t tend to shed as much light on the stories behind the songs as you’d expect; rather, they’re simply a clarification in full sentences of what we’ve already been told. The effect is like one of a strange sort of reverse colouring in: she first paints the colours of the images in shapes that could seem equivocal, then adds the outlines last to clarify the details.

Yet every detail of the lyrics seems somehow so important - indeed, literally vital - in a way that’s expressed often perfectly by her music. Her sense of dynamics, exemplified possibly most beautifully in ‘Day 3’ (especially transitioning from ‘Wonderland’), is impeccable, starting beautiful, slow and quiet, with a lowness of energy that almost feels muted, then building up by adding layers and broadening the range of the melody as well as getting actually louder. These parts that feel 'bigger' are as beautiful in their glory as the 'smaller', more understated parts in their whispering subtlety.

It’s interesting that in an accompanying interview Hersh compares the experience of sharing this work of hers with sharing your religion with someone, since this double album and book makes for an all consuming experience of wonder that does seem comparable. While getting the most out of this work takes a couple listens with at least one (simultaneous) read through with all your concentration, it’s worth every second and every bit of energy.

Pitchfork 75

Listening to a Kristin Hersh album is like receiving, unfiltered, a direct feed of someone’s thoughts, with all the internal symbols, memories, private jokes intact before they apply all the translation and explanation and interpretation to the outside world. One gets the sense she’s still trying to sort through it all herself. For this reason, her music inevitably is called “abstract”; it’s an understandable reaction, but totally inaccurate. Kristin Hersh writes in specifics. Her memoir Rat Girl—alternately titled Paradoxical Undressing, a typically allegorical reference to hypothermia patients stripping off their clothes even as they freeze to death—sheds light on a couple dozen of her and Throwing Muses’ tracks. Her songs are full of references to her own material,anecdotes that slip out in interviews and on stage, blunt and hyper-specific wisecracks. Singer-songwriters, particularly women, are often accused of writing confessional material even (especially?) when they’re not, but Hersh’s material generally is. “I haven’t got the kind of brain to invent anything, so I just write the stuff down that happens,” she told Soundblab. “The things that happened are so bizarre, you can’t make those things up.”

Wyatt at the Coyote Palace (named for one of her sons) is a typically personal and idiosyncratic affair. Like all her solo and Throwing Muses studio releases since 2010’s Crooked, Wyatt at the Coyote Palace is accompanied by a book of essays and artwork: less commentary on the tracks, and more another set of puzzle pieces to put together. (As well as a recipe for “hooker gazpacho.”) Like 1999’s Sky Motel, the sonics are rich; in addition to acoustic guitar, Hersh plays bass, drums, piano, horns, and cello, and engineer Steve Rizzo helps make it among her slickest-sounding recordings. After five years of tweaking results, she builds many of the arrangements to the beefiness of a typical Muses track; others are interspersed with muffled field recordings, an effect like hearing songs through mental fog. Like the Throwing Muses comeback album Purgatory/Paradise, the album is fragmentary and self-referential; songs reappear throughout the album in reprises, or reworks of and callbacks to past material.

And like her 2001 solo effort Sunny Border Blue, the album is viscerally preoccupied with loss: “I'm so fucking tired of dissolution,” Hersh says in “Sun Blown.” Sometimes it’s general loss—the running joke throughout the album’s accompanying essays is Hersh and her bandmates’ brushes with death, both funny and sneakily serious (a fair amount of essays end in the hospital). A few years ago Hersh divorced from her husband of 25 years. It’s crept into all her work since—last year’s book Don’t Suck Don’t Die started out as a eulogy for singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt but became a concurrent eulogy for the two songwriters’ marriages. But “Sun Blown” is perhaps the most explicit she's been: “The bailing mate dance, failing patience, fool's silver...” Like most of Hersh’s imagery, it’s not oblique at all when you get the reference: in this case, silver being the traditional 25th anniversary gift. The verse appears as a refrain throughout the album: leading into “Green Screen” and its descending counterpoint of a melody: “Red skin blackening, what is happening? The Art of Kissing, the heart of missing you.”

Unsurprisingly, this is heavy listening. “Shaky Blue Can,” “Shotgun” (reminiscent of “Terra Nova”) and “Secret Codes” are up there with “Listerine” and “Flooding” as among the most fragile material Hersh has recorded. But her work is always threaded through with levity; these songs resist easy classification. “Detox” breaks through into anger—confrontational lyrics, distorted guitar solo—but the almost poppy “Wonderland” recalls the Muses’ midcareer singles; “Hemingway’s Tell” could easily be adapted into one. For every bracing line like “everyone like me’s a dead man,” there’s a gnomic one-liner like “Incense, strawberry candles and soap—way to butcher a street.” The former track, “Killing Two Birds,” is deceptively cheery—the essay accompanying it sets it during a teenage coke-fueled jog. The latter, “Between Piety and Desire” (like Purgatory/Paradise, a play on street names) becomes a “we don’t like the shit, ‘cause we belong in it.” The “we” is key. As memoirs, her albums are so intensely personal it’s little wonder she’s amassed a cult fanbase (and cadre of crowdfunders); as art, they’re arguments for the value of unapologetic individuality.