50 Foot Wave Black Pearl LP (Turquoise Vinyl)

Black Pearl is the 2022 album from 50 Foot Wave: Kristin Hersh's "other" band - active since 2003, with fellow Throwing Muses' member Bernard Georges on bass and drummer Rob Ahlers. A sonic trip from the heavy, echoey riff of "Staring Into The Sun" with all of its grunge melancholy and dronecore menace to the perfectly baroque "Hog Child" with its spidery guitar that dissolves into motorik bass and drums.

Hailed in various quarters as "an outlet for the material deemed too weird or wild for Throwing Muses," their "menacing, stalking, spirals of lean, hungry riffs, set alight" as "feedback rips into the fragile melody."

50 Foot Wave continue to traverse the rigid tension of their own sound. They remain detuned and discordant at will.

Black Pearl honors the strengths of Hersh's entire body of work as well as 50 Foot Wave's singular talents. As on her Throwing Muses and solo albums of the late 2010s and early 2020s, Black Pearl finds Hersh's voice growing ever more expressive and textured....Black Pearl's sustained mood of brooding mystery sets it apart, and its darkly lustrous songs uphold 50 Foot Wave's reputation as a vital part of Hersh's music.

There's no better way to respond to these untethered times than playing some sludgy rock with some close friends. Black Pearl is the trio's gooiest work yet. Hersh marches into the tar pit, trailing behind her slowly corroding riffs and a rhythm section that matches her ever trudging step. Before she's completely subsumed, she growls out some words of desperate love and psychic pain.