On 30 August 1986, Melody Maker published a review of an untitled debut album. I missed the review and this album that year. I was pre-University, living in Harrow, listening to LBC most of the time, so I knew nothing much of music that wasn’t on the radio or television. Similarly, the likes of Melody Maker (RIP), Sounds (RIP), and NME, were unknown territory. The review was written by The Legendary Stud Brothers. It’s now eighteen years since this album was released, so it’s time for the review to be reprinted here:

Richard Hughes tells the story of a celebrated Russion dancer who was onced asked by a certain journalist what she meant by her dance. She replied with some exasperation that, if she could say it in so many words, why should she take the very great trouble of dancing it.

It’s a lesson often quoted and more often than not misunderstood. But it’s an important lesson because it’s probably the only valid and understandable explanation for obscurity. Mysteries are not there to be solved, they are perfect in themselves and, if a mystery is the clearest, the simplest, the only possible way of saying what you have to say, there’s surely little point in us questioning it. It is then somewhat bewildering that we should find ourselves having to talk about and explain the finest debut album of the Eighties and a very beautiful, contorted mystery. It makes us want to shout.

Throwing Muses are four young Bostonians who have collaborated on weaving this particular mystery and the only real reason to talk about them rather than listen to them is that so you too will have that enviable luxury.

Kristin Hersh is the girl who writes the lyrics and music, plays guitar and sings. There’s the voice of violence in this music and it’s a hot, passionate female violence. It’s a voice like Joan Baez with spikey hair or a smacked-out Debbie Harry on helium, a voice that leads its accompaniment to suburbia, where Sonic Youth meet the Motels, commit adultery and die in a crime of passion. Throwing Muses sound like no-one else.

There is little point in, or even justification for, mentioning any single track. The album is what albums should always have been – a complete body of work. Every song here is a stubborn testament to the afflication of love, each note and word a glimpse into a pit of shattered fragments, each fragment part of a persona Kristin Hersh has created as the voice and vehicle of her obsessions. In her writing we meet the incurably terrified people who will not risk disappointment and are therefore imprisoned by fear, the greatest fear being of course humilation, which is here equated with love. Hence, by sad inversion of cart and horse, Kristin’s characters become convinced they are unlovable.

Musically, the result is an unnerving slide between whispered reclusion and uncontrolled agression, each climax a twisted observation of obsession, each obsession a twisted fetishist vision of life. Life as rape, subjugation, domination and death. Though it’s by no means new to sing about any of these things, what Throwing Muses have done is to find a new language for them. The scarred, scared figures that haunt their songs are opened like so many bleeding hearts, their extreme hostility and vulnerability at once hateful and understandable. The music, unlike so much of the music that accompanies these themes, is not just some background soundtrack for neurosis, it’s a punch, accentuating and projecting every hiss, mutter and scream. It’s so exact and punctual it’s simply sublime.

There’s something weird about this pleasure, something weird about this record. Its shocking poetry and musical invention are not something we would normally hope to find in a group’s debut, especially a group so young and American. What’s even more surprising is that such odd pop and mercurial self-obsession, though occasionally leaning towards the self-indulgent, is never pretentious. You believe every word that’s said. Finally, that such inelastic monomania should be so prepossessing either says something very grand and special about its presentation or something very strange about us. Throwing Muses is a gorgeous dangerous dance, but don’t ask why they’re dancing. The answer is the dance.