Live Music Review: Kristin Hersh at Triskel, Cork

4/5

Kristin Hersh had come to sing, but also to delve into her unlikely second career as memoirist. In the 1990s, the New England native was in the vanguard of American alternative rock, as front woman of Throwing Muses and as a solo artist whose songs offered a striking blend of ethereal and eerie.

Her voice remains an instrument of impressive catharsis, as she demonstrated negotiating both new solo LP, Wyatt at the Coyote Palace, and Throwing Muses’s 2013 album, Purgatory/Paradise. But, in between the barbed indie pop, Hersh (50), had a surprise: spoken-word extracts from her several books, including a wrenching account of her friendship with the late tunesmith, Vic Chesnutt (who took his own life in 2009).