Music Arcades: Throwing Muses: House Tornado + The Fat Skier

Maybe I'm the only one who sees things this way, or maybe it's just a few people around my age, but I bracket this music in with the Sonic Youth of the second half of the eighties, the first two or three Pixies albums and Galaxie 500. This was never a scene, and as such it didn't have a name (if "indie rock" had been coined by then, it denoted a different set of music with a specific, narrower focus than it has now). But, to my mind, it adds up to a whole lot more than all of grunge and all of britpop put together.

What do I hear in these recordings that makes them important? A commitment to old-fashioned guitar/bass/drums rock music but approached askance, slightly out of tune, off-centre, or, in the case of early Throwing Muses, always on the point of cracking. As I said previously of Throwing Muses, it's the grain of Kristin Hersh's voice that embodies this for me.

As far as I remember this, their second album, was compared unfavourably in the music press to both their first and third. Somehow that indicated to me that I might like it, and I did — from the febrile energy of the opening lines about cold lightening and feeling like an alarm clock to A Feeling, which is more sedate, but still stretched as tight as animal hide over a hand drum.