“Criticism of unprecedented fullness…”—Kirkus
Rebounding With Hooks
Boston Phoenix, March 17, 1988
A MOTHER AT 19, Kristin Hersh writes songs for Throwing Muses in the shorthand of someone forced to grow up fast. In her lyrics she yearns for the remainder of an adolescence cut short and for an adulthood that makes sense of working in a rock band. Her elusive song puzzles, spiked by Throwing Muses’ folk punk, can speak to you long before you understand what she‘s on about. Besides the words, the chief difficulty is the songs’ odd shapes.
Ending in the Middle
Boston Phoenix, August 26, 1988
WHEN IN 1980, Joy Division’s singer and songwriter, Ian Curtis, hanged himself at his Manchester home, he had attracted an adoring cult on both sides of the Atlantic who were scarcely surprised that the band’s three-year recording stretch was one long prologue to his suicide. The remaining members (drummer Stephen Morris, bassist Peter Hook, and guitarist Bernard Sumner—keyboardist/guitarist Gillian Gilbert joined up shortly) continued on as New Order, served best by last year’s two-record anthology Substance that highlights the group’s trendsetting flair for pop song forms that seem to bleed anguish. When Curtis finishes singing Joy Division’s wrenching entreaties in the verse of “Warsaw” (“All this tug and no contact/No matter how hard you try”) and the band compresses the song’s already clinched patterns into a wad of unrepentant despondency, it’s punctuating his words even as they’re choked off.
Reason to Believe
LA Review of Books, June 9, 2023
BACK IN 1978, nobody thought we would get to see Springsteen at 73, storming stages with the thrill of a teenager, singing beyond what many younger vocalists might attempt, while leading audiences through a catalog surplus that traces his music’s curves over 50 years. But why throw all of that history and power behind Ticketmaster when you could use it to lead your audience into a more equitable system?
Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary (1988)
Riley offers a new, deeper understanding of the Beatles by closely considering each song and album they recorded in an exploration as rigorous as it is soulful.
"In Tell Me Why, a labor of loving obsession, Tim Riley minutely examines the music of the Beatles... Song by song, he notes the subtleties of craft and inspiration that keep the Beatles' recordings contemporary, illuminating music so familiar it's often taken for granted."