Kristin Hersh — Clear Pond Road
Qobuz new release review (Sept. 2023)
The gorgeous, chiming guitar figure of “Bewitched Reruns” opens Clear Pond Road on a deceptively placid note. Although the song itself — with its gentle string accompaniment and slow-burn vibe — is reminiscent of her earliest solo material on 1994’s Hips and Makers, its softer contours are not the defining characteristic of the rest of the album. Instead, on her 12th solo studio album — outside of her already prodigious output with Throwing Muses and 50 Foot Wave — Kristin Hersh is once again leaning into the tense dynamic that plays out when she pits her rough-hewn voice (grown even more husky as she enters her fifth decade of music-making) and emotionally intense and structurally unorthodox songwriting against the relative sparseness of an “acoustic” setting. Hersh has always been a superlative songwriter — hence the dizzying pace of her release schedule — with a voice that has been a perfect channel for her imagery-dense lyrics and a penchant for unusual rhythms and song structures. So while a song like “Eyeshine” could be described as an atmospheric, folk-adjacent number, the intensity of Hersh’s delivery of lines like “This is nice/ And only half of it cost any money” immediately injects an unexpected edge to the whole affair. Likewise, the soulful experimentalism of “Constance Street” is both gorgeous and heart-wrenching in equal measures, while the innovative arrangement of “Valentine’s Day Massacre” is memorable both for its deep and muscular acoustic guitar line and a dissonant bridge section that seems intent on obliterating it. In the same way that album opener “Bewitched Reruns” trickily traffics in lush, coffeehouse vibes, lead single “Dandelion” seems to be a fragile jewel-box of a song, with Hersh playing a (relatively) straightforward guitar part alongside a slowly humming cello and an occasional triangle acting as the song’s only percussion instrument. However, despite the simplicity of its parts, the song’s innate intensity and Hersh’s evocative lyrics combine to demand the listener’s attention.
