THE BREEDERS: TITLE TK (2002)
1) Little Fury; 2) London
Song; 3) Off You; 4) The She; 5) Too Alive; 6) Son Of Three; 7) Put On A Side;
8) Full On Idle; 9) Sinister Foxx; 10) Forced To Drive; 11) T And T; 12) Huffer.
Almost ten years separate this one from the
last Breeders LP — ten years in which lots and lots of things happened to
alt-rock and indie-rock, and over which both the Pixies and the Breeders had
sort of become living, but somewhat outdated legends, and not even Kurt was
alive any more to give Kim and Kelley's next offering the proper praise, though
I'm fairly sure he would have loved Title
TK to yet another death, had he had the chance.
Anyway, these
Breeders have everything and nothing in common with those Breeders. Everything, because this is very much a Breeders
record in design and execution; nothing, because the Deal sisters are the only
Breeders left around — neither Richard Presley (guitar), nor Mando Lopez (bass,
guitar), nor Jose Medeles (drums) had anything to do with Pod or Last Splash (in
fact, the former two players were recruited by Kim from the then-current lineup
of L.A. hardcore punk band Fear). But you know what? For all of this record's
sparseness, it might as well have been recorded by the Deal sisters alone — that is, as long as old friend
Steve Albini stayed behind the engineering console. After all, Kim is credited
here for «guitar, organ, drums, bass, vocals», and it's not as if you're gonna hear
any flutes or harpsichords — and, if you'll pardon me this one more pun, it's Kim
and only Kim that is the right deal for the Breeders.
In a way, Title
TK was Kim's «protest album». Technically, it is sort of a cross between
the less accessible Pod and the more
«poppy» Last Splash — the ascetic,
bare-bones nature of the songs hearkens back to Pod, but the heavy infusion of the songs with hard-to-forget pop
hooks shows that mystical spontaneity was far from the only force driving the songs.
What is also important, though, is that Kim insisted on analog-only recording
techniques — no, this is not lo-fi here (thankfully), but this is still as raw
as it gets, flubs and accidents included. Had the songs been poor at the core,
this approach could be judged as unnecessarily pretentious; but with such
strong hooks, the occasional «what-the-heck-was-that?» reaction only spices up the
proceedings.
And what are these strong hooks, may you ask? Well,
they usually come in the form of very brief, but strongly emphasized «clippings»
— vocal or instrumental. Considering
how hard it has been to come up with
short, punchy, resonant hooks ever since half of the world's population
enlisted in rock and roll bands, I feel half-amused, half-amazed at how many
cool phrasings there are in these short blasts. Sometimes you have to wait for
them, of course: ʽLittle Furyʼ opens the album with a generic mid-tempo beat
and some expectedly somnambulant, nonsensical vocals, distributed between the
Deal sisters in a rather chaotic pattern... it is not until 2:08 that the
nasty, teasing little four-note riff starts up, and it goes away after just a
few bars, but that little is enough to get the back of your mind thinking —
what was that? was that really
necessary? was it really a tease, or a threat, or a warning? does it have any
relation to the tender chorus admonition of "hold what you've got"?..
well — "it's a living thing", as Jeff Lynne would say.
ʽLondon Songʼ, on the other hand, is totally
vocal-dependent — dependent, in fact, on one word: as devoid of direct
interpretation as "slipping through the states to find the static, yeah
there's something to believe" is, using the word "believe" for
the final resolution of the chorus is a brilliant move, because it turns the
entire song into a sort of intimate, camouflaged «I'm holding on» anthem. But
this vocal dependency becomes even more explicit on ʽOff Youʼ, which is a
ballad (I think — with this approach, the difference between tender ballad and
angry rocker seems to be blurred) that totally rides on Deal's personal
charisma as filtered through her vocal cord modulation. The dry overtones, the
ability to conjure some detached innocence and «infantile wisdom» through
potentially over-pompous lines like ʽI am the autumn in the scarlet / I am the
make-up on your eyesʼ, the stern, but tender conclusion of each chorus with a
laconic "yeah we're movin' — yeah, we're movin'" (don't forget the
rising rather than falling intonation on the second movin'), it's all ascetically beautiful in a way that's doggone
hard to explain.
Most of the album sounds «broken» — short vocal
lines consisting of incomplete sentences (often put together through phonetic
associations rather than any logically meaningful purpose), short guitar
bursts, lots of jagged, stop-and-start sequences. An uncomfortable flow, but
you get used to it eventually — a good example is ʽThe Sheʼ, one of the verses
of which goes "It's my death / My rhythm / My arithmetic / I got used to /
Nobody ridin' in the back", so just don't ride in the back and you'll be
okay with the song's clumsy, but effective funk beat, distorted growling organ,
and more of those «nasty teaser» guitar mini-riffs that are so popular this
season. When the song does have an
uninterrupted flow, it might happen with the aid of a loudly mixed, simple,
repetitive, eerie bassline — ʽPut On A Sideʼ does just that out of one simple note
and one bit of glissando — or with the aid of a sped-up tempo, like the closing
ʽHufferʼ, which says goodbye with a much-needed merry nursing rhyme:
"Torn, toiled and troubled... toil toil toil till I get sick, I try
reverse but I'm not that quick".
Not every song is great — in fact, I would
hesitate to call any of these songs «great»,
because they simply do not trigger that kind of verbal association — but leave
it to Ms. Deal and her ghostly shadow of a sister to come up with an indie-rock
album that does not leave even the slightest tinge of a «oh no, not another
indie-rock album» reaction. Not too
catchy, not too friendly, not too enigmatic, but a perfect balance of
all three to give you entertainment, enjoyment, and intrigue. And let us not
forget to thank Mr. Albini one more time — after all, he is still one of the
few people around to know how not to
strip indie-rock electric guitar of its ability to thrill and hypnotize. In
short, an all-around excellent comeback for the Breeders, but pardon me if I
just end this with a regular thumbs up instead of a detailed amateur Freudian
analysis, which I am sure it deserves from somebody who is much more qualified.
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