This is a classic example of a CD bought alongside several others and then forgotten about, only to be rediscovered a decade later with the realisation that it is really, really good. This isn’t the first time this has happened, and given there are still CDs on the shelf I haven’t really given due attention to, it’s likely it won’t be the last.
This album was released in 1991 and bought by me in 2007, when I was living in a shared flat in Oval with two old schoolfriends. (I loved that flat. It was in a terrible state when we moved into it and it got worse from there. There was an old mattress in the hallway when we got there that we made people who stayed over sleep on. It was bad).
1991 was an amazing year for music. In fact, let’s just list a few of the albums released that year, because the selection is mind-blowing:
- Nevermind
- Blue Lines
- Bandwagonesque
- Laughing Stock
- The Low End Theory
- Screamadelica
- The White Room
- Out of Time
- Loveless
- Foxbase Alpha
- Steady Diet of Nothing
- Achtung Baby
- Trompe Le Monde
- Seamonsters
Not bad, eh? That’s one classic per month right there, and that’s excluding today’s subject.
Throwing Muses generally have a few adjectives thrown at them: angular, experimental, unorthodox. This is certainly true on a lot of their albums, and even on this, their pop masterpiece. Although really it should be “pop” in inverted commas because these aren’t really pop songs by any mainstream definition, but by the Muses’ standards they’re among the most melodic and straightforward they ever recorded. It’s also the perfect length for an album, clocking in at twelve tracks and 40 minutes, so bonus points right there.**
Weirdly though, I remember on first listen it didn’t sound like there was much in the way of actual tunes, which is probably why I shelved it for so long. When I dug it out again though, Counting Backwards wormed its way into my head and stayed there long enough for me to revisit the whole thing a bit more. And that was all it took for me to fall in love with it. Once the melodies are lodged in your brain they’re there for good, and there’s just enough bite to the whole thing to keep you coming back to it. It features Tanya Donelly’s highlight Not Too Soon, showcasing her talent for joyful, melodic tunes that would soon come to attention through Pod and Star and beyond.
I went on to listen to a lot more Throwing Muses after this, and even though The Real Ramona is still my favourite, none of the albums I listened to were anything less than really good. In fact, Sun Racket from 2020 is an absolute belter. Also, if you get the chance, read Kristin Hersh’s 2010 memoir, Rat Girl. It’s a document of a year in the life of Throwing Muses in the mid-1980s, and it’s brilliant.
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**It’s been scientifically proven that 40–45 minutes is the perfect album length. Before CDs all records used to come in at a maximum of 45 minutes (unless they were deliberately made as double albums), but for some reason it was decided that CDs should be able to hold 73 minutes of music. Once CDs knocked vinyl records out of the marketplace in the 1990s it meant that having to keep the length down was no longer necessary, resulting in albums that sprawled just for the sake of having the extra runtime.
