Live Review: Kristin Hersh

Kristin Hersh takes her place on stage, squares her body and lifts her gaze to stare down the crowd. Her small frame may not physically occupy much space, but she is formidable. In the recording studio her sound might be called 'jangling', but on stage, without her backing band, Hersh's voice is raw, her guitar is rugged and there is no need for anyone else behind her. Left to her own devices, Hersh produces churning ballads that ooze with dark, threatening, swampy self-mythology.

After two offerings, Hersh sets aside her guitar and thumbs through a post-it-note-marked volume of her own published writing and reads aloud. She would do this several more times throughout the evening, working her way through her memoirs and books (on several occasions Hersh has released her music as books, packaging the music with essays, images and, of course, lyrics). These readings don't give the evening a poetic feel per se, instead, they lend it an introspection and a centredness. They are monologues about driving, bars, the ocean, struggle and death that show off Hersh's wry humour. These readings also reveal Hersh's generosity as an artist, and her warmth; she smiles at jokes, takes on different characters, pauses for effect and carefully delivers inflections in her rounded Rhode Island accent.

Hersh's set takes on a certain sameness after awhile, but in combination with the readings, it feels less like repetition and increasingly like persistent immersion in her history with its gnarled landscapes and vivid detail. Her music churns on, sampling from across her projects and career, just as the memoirs do. In a reading from Rat Girl, her Penguin-published memoir, she says that "playing music is owning violence" — this is a good way to think about Hersh's live performance: it's not combative exactly, but it does harness a kind of violence and power that is ultimately intoxicating.