Bands create an aesthetic alliance
CAMBRIDGE -- Kristin Hersh and Robert Fisher seem to have little in common beyond the fact that both are esteemed indie musicians who used to live in Boston. She sings fierce rock music. He fronts a folk-noir chamber ensemble. But their performances at side-by-side clubs in Central Square on Wednesday -- Hersh with her new band 50 Foot Wave and Fisher with four members of his fluid collective the Willard Grant Conspiracy -- revealed a surprising and deep aesthetic alliance. Maybe it was their haunted, unwavering gazes. Or the way both were virtually immobile in front of their microphones, Hersh spewing venom and Fisher crooning ghost stories. Both shows were shot through with a riveting absence of artifice, a preternatural clarity of purpose, and songs that stretch the edges of popular music into signature shapes. Hersh purges mightily. She always has, first with college rock darlings Throwing Muses and then on a string of quiet, intense solo albums. 50 Foot Wave, which includes drummer Rob Ahlers, and former Muses bassist Bernard Georges, is the ultimate reduction: a three-piece thrash-riff machine so fabulously basic it almost cancelled out the complicated chord changes and schizoid meters. But the band swings. It wouldn't kick a hook out of bed. And its frontwoman exudes a demonic serenity that reaffirms the whole point of this dark-hearted racket. There was no escaping the twisted depths when Hersh opened her mouth and let the damage fly.
On "Clara Bow," a song from the band's eponymous debut EP and the explosive finale to 50 Foot Wave's main set, Hersh tried to put a pretty melody through the grater of her voice. It didn't work, so she conjured a thread of feedback instead. As if on cue flashbulbs popped, and one couldn't help only marvel at how literally damage can be transposed from life to art.
Fisher takes a more amiable tack, sonically and otherwise. He began the show with a few incisive words of introduction -- "Without further ado, let's hear some songs about death" -- and proceeded to burrow into a hard, spectral wash of gothic Americana. Had the timing worked, Hersh could have slipped next door to sing her part on WGC's opening song, "The Ghost of the Girl in the Well," from the group's most recent album "Regard the End." But Fisher carried the long, lush notes to the far reaches of his elegant drawl, in which he spoke plainly of one brutal loss after another as if to instruct in the main points of our tragic existence. The most unsettling edge was supplied, oddly enough, by a violin, whose harsh tone battled an electric guitar to become the rough, defining presence during WGC's somber set.
Fisher, like Hersh, hardly seemed to be performing, but rather opening a private window on his heavy, alternative view. She throws hers open violently. He eases it up a crack at a time. But the sight lines are equally clear and true.
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com
50 Foot Wave
At: T.T. the Bear’s,Wednesday night
Willard Grant Conspiracy
At: the Middle East, Wednesday night
