Throwing Muses

That collegians fall for this conflation of women's music and bad poetry proves how desperately both sexes yearn for anything that abrogates the male chauvinism of guitar-bass-and-drums tradition. Its virtues are all in the guitar, bass, and drums, which play off the melody line instead of mimicking or augmenting it and are only accompaniment anyway--meaningless without Kristen Hersh's personalized verbiage, meaningless with it. (Grade: C)