Kristin Hersh - Learn To Sing Like A Star (4AD)
4/5
By: Christiana Spens
Kristin Hersh has had a fascinating and eclectic life, living all over the US, from California to Rhode Island, from Georgia to New Orleans, forever expanding her repertoire and imagination, a vault of sensations, a labyrinth of lyrics. If her nomadic life were represented in a picture it would be a long mosaic still being pieced together, each piece a fractured thought made into a chord or a phrase, then a song, collected together until a record is made, lately the endearing "Learn to Sing Like a Star".
There is something incredibly wise about this record, clearly songs written from genuine experience and a gut reaction to turn chaos and distraction into something ordered - using pictures and postcards to turn blank sheets of paper into maps that people listening to the songs can take and use to move on as she does. Citing experiences ranging from a flood in her house to the wider scale drowning of New Orleans, one of her favourite haunts and muse of earlier tunes, to personal heartache and drama (she has four sons, incidentally, as well as leading the punk-influenced power trio 50 foot Wave, not to mention Throwing Muses: a lot to sing about) - Hersh's songs are enticing and addictive. She reminds me of Courtney Love without the LA freak show and bouts of rehab; she is an altogether more professional musician, altogether more real a star.
Although Kristin Hersh took the title of the album from an advertisement that kept popping up in her inbox, and it was intended as a kind of irony, she is a star, simply obscured from widespread fame with a little cloud. It doesn't seem to be a bad thing. In a time when so many singers and bands are distracted, even corrupted by early fame and fortune, it is revealing that some of the best work is obscure, the best artists still scrape by as if this was twenties Paris. Another artist worth mentioning for the same reason is Sparklehorse - a musician from North Carolina who has been a cult figure for decades and used to work in a mine in Virginia. His songs are influenced by Blake and he once put the poem "London" to music in such a way that Blake came crawling out of the smog and dust and was alive again in an original and beautiful tune. He has the same weather-worn, beatnik voice as Kristin Hersh, the same kind of integrity sadly missing from so many bands who lose their novelty after an album. I sometimes wonder what would have happened to the Libertines if they had not been so famous - would they still be together? Would they have kept writing those songs?
Blake, who of course influenced Peter Doherty as well as the more obscure Sparklehorse, was never recognised as a great writer in his lifetime. It was not until he died that people started taking his poetry seriously and realised him to be a genius. At the time he was considered a madman. There are musicians like Blake around, who are great and yet relatively unknown, like Kristin Hersh or Sparklehorse and probably many I have never heard. And then there are musicians who have the potential to be like Blake, only their talent is wasted on the trappings of fame.
Perhaps Kristin Hersh will find fame and fortune with this solo album - it surely deserves recognition: it is an eclectic and weather-worn record about storms and chaos and floods and fire... From the addictive "Under the Gun" that drags me in with a whispered grating voice and dreamy reverie of a tune, a cloud scraping the rubble of a mussed up southern town... To the Lolita-esque "Sugarbaby", all seductive drawling voice enticing with romantic yearning and sugar mixed with the grit of the sky... To "Vertigo" that sounds like a lullaby and a grunge record melted together "And in the subsequent solitude, flat on our backs again... with the devil, Lucienne... I've left my heart on the frozen side-walk... Isn't this a lousy drug? Isn't this a pretty fall? Isn't this vertigo? Isn't this wonderful?"
The lyrics are carved into the violin like Blake engraved his lines into copper plate, sung into the wind like you blow smoke into the dusky sky.
There is something very romantic and defiant about Kristin Hersh's songs, something that means she won't care if she's never famous, never one of the stars people read their horoscopes from, set their lives to: she is one of those stars you only see on a clear night when you're looking carefully. You won't read about her in Grazia, she's no Courtney Love - she's more like Courtney Love's less famous twin - no more talented necessarily (again, Courtney Love did heroin chic and the inherent unfulfilled potential before Doherty), but with the blessing in disguise that is a lack of fame and a lack of fortune, but no lack of enticing songs and luminosity. If you don't have money to buy drugs, then there's more time to write songs, which may be harder, but in the end worth it.
Your Feedback
Login to post your comment