Kristin Hersh - Sunny Border Blue

4AD - 2001 - 51 minutes

Kristin Hersh, of Throwing Muses fame - but not fortune - is back with another solo album of troubled but fascinating songs. Although 'Sunny Border Blue' is initially a difficult album to penetrate, it has something that draws you back and draws you in until you too are an inmate of Hersh's askew world. A solo album in the strictest sense of the word - she plays all the instruments, writes all the songs (apart from an outstanding version of Cat Stephen's Trouble) and produces the finished work -'Sunny Border Blue' is well worth spending time with.

The lyrics are stream of consciousness, Burroughs-style cut-ups about personal incidents - the break-up of the Muses, losing custody of her eldest son, hating the one you also love - that hang together to make an obscure kind of sense. Although Hersh sometimes seems almost too fragile to expose herself this way, she seems to have reached a new understanding of herself and the way her songs emerge. In Candyland she sings "I lost a boy" but "this isn't trauma/it's not even drama anymore" because "I was born with a sad song in my mouth". The highpoint has to be the haunting cadences of "smoky" Spain. Initially a gentle ballad, Hersh suddenly cries out angrily "I wanted you to sleep with her and hate yourself instead of me". She refuses to look at the world through rose-tinted lenses, instead levelling her steely blue gaze at the dark corners and ugly places. Although there is an occasional mis-step - Silica sounds like Neil Young's The Needle and The Damage Done - ' Sunny Border Blue' is a remarkable album, a welcome addition to the catalogue of a vibrant and ever-fascinating artist.

Caroline Hennessy

Tracklisting: Your Dirty Answer - Spain - 37 Hours - Silica - William's Cut - Summer Salt - Trouble - Candyland - Measure - White Suckers - Ruby - Flipside - Listerine