The Breeders: Mountain Battles

THE BREEDERS: MOUNTAIN BATTLES (2008)

1) Overglazed; 2) Bang On; 3) Night Of Joy; 4) We're Gonna Rise; 5) German Studies; 6) Spark; 7) Istanbul; 8) Walk It Off; 9) Regalame Esta Noche; 10) Here No More; 11) No Way; 12) It's The Love; 13) Mountain Battles.

Well... no mistake about it, this is yet another Breeders album, and it still got that old Pod vibe. But it is also hard to get rid of the feeling that the Deal sisters sound either a little tired, or a little uninspired. The only more or less upbeat song has to be a cover (ʽIt's The Loveʼ by the Tasties), and the rest drag — not in the curse sense of the word, but literally so. Lots of slow dirges, craw­ling, stuttering, bleeding guitars, and vocals that already go beyond «somnambulant» and move into «deadly wounded» category. Really, it makes me depressed just to have to review this stuff, let alone listen to it one more time.

Not that the Deal sisters themselves would agree with me, and plenty of reviewers probably wouldn't, either: they just wrote something along the lines of «this is the best Breeders album since [insert random Breeders album here]» and told us lots of things about how the Breeders usually play and record their songs, which was of no use for Breeders fans and of little help for Breeders neophytes, because one million indie-rock bands that came since the Breeders played and recorded their songs like the Breeders did. Anyway, I may be totally confused here, but I sense pain, depression, and tiredness all over these songs — never mind that they were allegedly recorded over a period of five years, at different studios and with varying band lineups.

Do not be deceived by titles like ʽNight Of Joyʼ and ʽWe're Gonna Riseʼ. The former rides upon a quietly threatening bass line and is actually about a night of sorrow, with vocals that stop two steps short of weeping; and ʽWe're Gonna Riseʼ is so slow and plaintive, you kind of get the feeling that it will take a lot of calories (and time, and toil, and trouble) for «us» to rise, whoever «we» are (the Deal sisters, the Breeders, all the good people in general, all the bad people in gene­ral, etc.).

The title track is really something — an exercise in «gutter music» if there ever was one, most of it spent by Kim excreting loosely joined phrases that give the illusion of being completely free-form, over an array of electronic pulses and feedback blasts (yes, Steve Albini is at the production wheel again, and how did you guess that?). It's another impressive way to close an album, but it ain't nothing like the humorous-vivacious ʽHufferʼ or the pretty-dreamy ʽDrivin' On 9ʼ — this one just bleeds internally, with high fever, delirium, and everything that comes along. Nothing too overtly shocking (Kim Deal is no Courtney Love, and even her juvenile phase as Kim Deal is long gone), but certainly not a pretty experience.

The problem is, while I can certainly respect the vibe, Mountain Battles has a bit too much in the drab, drag, limp, and stutter department about it to be treated on par with the previous two albums, or even with Pod. This can have its positive effects — it may well be one of those records that grows and grows on you, biding its time and waiting for you to get sick, old, depres-sed, confused, broody, whatever, to appreciate its subtle anti-charms, and at the present time, I am not quite there yet, though I'm getting close. But then again, even this growth requires that the songs be able to work like a lens, gathering your vibes and focusing them with the music — and this doesn't really work with songs like ʽSparkʼ, which just meander between mindless strumming and short shrieking guitar blasts and sound like first-stage demos for classic Portishead («first stage» meaning just that — the stage where you have only just begun visualizing what your song will eventually sound like).

Sometimes Kim is just being cute without a well-understood reason, for instance, when out of the blue she covers a Mexican song (Roberto Cristobal's ʽRegalame Esta Nocheʼ), or creates a generic country tune in her sleepwalking stylistics (ʽHere No Moreʼ). Sometimes the sisters show off their knowledge — ʽIstanbulʼ, for instance, is a «novelty» number that will please lovers of popular etymology (if it so happens that you do not get the "where you're going?" - "to the city!" call-and-response hook of the song, look up the ʽIstanbulʼ page on Wikipedia). Most of the time, though, the experience just consists of the sisters morbidly trading stern chunks of dark vocal pop to equally morbid guitar phrasing (ʽGerman Studiesʼ, ʽSparkʼ, etc.), and you really have to get in the mood to «get» the attitude, or, rather, the necessity of getting the attitude.

I am positively sure that some people will want to defend Mountain Battles as an essential Breeders album — perhaps even go as far as to claim that this one has the deepest mystery of 'em all. And they may be right, but under one condition: that one regards the Breeders themselves as an essential band, worth exploring from their humble «Pixies offshoot» beginning and all the way down to that as-of-yet-to-come age when an 80-year old Kim Deal and a 110-year old Bob Dylan record a duet album of Cole Porter songs. I am not quite sure that Kim Deal is that important a character — I'll take her when she rocks and invents whacko pop hooks, but when she's sulking like this, demanding that we spend too much time on all her whims (including crooning in Spanish), it's a little different.

Thumbs up all the same — far be it from me to put down an ety­mologically relevant record — but if this is going to be the last full-length Breeders LP (which is far from certain, as the Deals tend to really enjoy their long breaks), it's definitely a low-key exit that offers no true resolution to the saga of the Breeders. Then again, maybe that is the best resolution.

The Breeders: Title TK

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.

The Breeders: Last Splash

THE BREEDERS: LAST SPLASH (1993)

1) New Year; 2) Cannonball; 3) Invisible Man; 4) No Aloha; 5) Roi; 6) Do You Love Me Now?; 7) Flipside; 8) I Just Wanna Get Along; 9) Mad Lucas; 10) Divine Hammer; 11) S.O.S.; 12) Hag; 13) Saints; 14) Drivin' On 9; 15) Roi (reprise).

Sorry if this breaks any conventions, but this, not Pod, should be the Breeders' primary claim to fame. Yes, so Pod is a bit more lo-fi, off-the-cuff, stream-of-conscious-to-record kind of a thing, whereas Last Splash is rather «stereotypical indie rock» in comparison — not to mention being far closer to the regular Pixies style. But who really cares, if the songs are that good?..

For this album, the Breeders were: Kim Deal on vocals, guitars, and keyboards; Josephine Wiggs on bass; Jim MacPherson on drums; and, most interestingly, Kim's own twin sister Kelley Deal on second guitar, even though, prior to joining the Breeders, she did not know how to play at all (nice boost to all of you non-playing, but aspiring suckers out there). It's not as if it took a lot of skill to play anything on this record, but the Breeders are not about skill — they're your friends, the lovely gruff cavemen (actually, cavewomen mostly) with a knack for converting gruffness into romanticism with simple, but efficient melodic twists.

Well, at least they are now. Most of these songs are short, concise, catchy, and likeable. "We have come for light", Kim announces at the very beginning, before the tempo speeds up and over a heavy psychedelic gallop we are being told that "I am the rain, I am the new year, I am the sun". Silly people might call this approach «pretentious», but in the warped world of the Pixies and the Breeders, nothing ever gets taken too seriously. They are just having fun, opening the season with a brief shamanistic ritual for the electric guitar. Good groove.

The actual hooks start coming with ʽCannonballʼ, whose frolicking bassline and wobbling lead guitar flourishes form a perfect combination with the vocals, which also wobble (her "spitting in a wishing well" is adorable, the way those hushed vowels weave around the guitar) and then come together in a perfectly sunny — and totally minimalistic — chorus of "in the shade, in the shade". Here, the mystical appeal of the Pixies — as in, when you know for sure that these songs are great but you have no idea why — reappears in all its glory: I totally fail to understand why this song moves me so much or even how it moves me, but it does.

As does ʽInvisible Manʼ, which is already a little less mysterious — if you cleaned it up a bit from all the dirty feedback and brought the vocals a little upfront, it'd be, like, totally a song from The Velvet Underground & Nico, on the Nico side of things, of course. Kim sings it in her low register, quite similar to the way Nico told us once to beware of the femme fatale — here, though, we are told to beware of The Invisible Man, which is pretty much the same thing in a different gender role. Beautiful, evocative vocal part, nice ʽWalrusʼ-style string arrangements.

It's not just the vocals, though — ʽRoiʼ, which is pretty much an instrumental, is one of the best Sonic Youth songs never written by Sonic Youth, even if one of the guitarists never knew how to play guitar. A bit of dark ambience, a bit of pure noise, a clever build-up towards a rocking cli­max, even a little quotation from the ʽWhole Lotta Loveʼ riff... well, technically it's not much to speak of, but I like how it is structured like a four-minute multi-part suite that pretty much sum­marizes everything cool that was invented by DIY indie people — before it all became regurgi­tated and plagiarized so often that the DIY spirit became a parody of its former self.

Just two more highlights, and I'll shut up: ʽDivine Hammerʼ is a wonderfully optimistic and de­termined track — "I'm just looking for one divine hammer" is one phrase that is really tough to get out of your head, especially because of the pitch jump on "hammer" (later on, echoed by the lead line), and then, you also never know if she is being semi-serious or totally ironic (you pro­bably wouldn't think that Kim Deal is being serious when she sings "I'm just looking for a faith, waiting to be followed" — then again, what do we really know about Kim Deal? And what do we really know about the word «faith»?).

And, of course, there's the obligatory «Moe Tucker-style conclusion»: ʽDrivin' On 9ʼ is a gor­geous little ditty, fiddle and all, a perfect mixture of indie rock and country that is indeed a perfect, though much too short, soundtrack for a slow late night cruise, and nobody could sing it as sweetly as Kim does in her overgrown child voice. A peaceful, traditionalist, yet totally not tacky tune for us all to take a load off.

See, this is what happens when you just make a teensy-weensy effort to support your already burgeoning charisma. Really, the numbers on Pod were these little unfocused bursts of charis­matic energy — with Last Splash, we get something that is more conventional, but nothing can really be too conventional with these eccentric ladies. If you only go for «innovation», pure and simple (yes, and eat something new for breakfast every day, too), you might get bored. If you prefer your innovation mixed with old-fashioned pop sensibility, well... thumbs up, and let's get on with it.

The Breeders: Pod

THE BREEDERS: POD (1990)

1) Glorious; 2) Doe; 3) Happiness Is A Warm Gun; 4) Oh!; 5) Hellbound; 6) When I Was A Painter; 7) Fortunately Gone; 8) Iris; 9) Opened; 10) Only In 3's; 11) Lime House; 12) Metal Man.

You know, there might actually be a good reason why Black Francis rarely, if ever, let Kim Deal contribute her own tunes to Pixies' albums — she just ain't that good a songwriter. Perfect bass playing for that band, awesome vocal sidekick to Frank, charismatic personage all around, but no matter how much I listen to Pod, I just can't remember any of the goddamn songs. They sound totally awesome, for sure, but that's not really «songwriting», the way I see it, it's more like... like... like sleepwalking with a well-tuned bass in one's hands.

But yeah, songwriting ain't everything, and I guess an album like Pod just had to be made, be­cause it's not just «Pixies without the hooks». It's more like The Breeders were a younger brother of The Pixies — you know, the kind of small kid who has not yet had any time to match the achievements of his successful elder brother, but has that ring of endearing promising charm around him. Except that Kim Deal seems to go backwards rather than forward from the Pixies: there is a certain narrowing down of the vision here, a certain amount of deconstruction and focus on the backbone, which, I guess, is sort of natural to expect from a bass player — even if Kim actually doesn't play much bass on this album, so it seems.

Anyway, in 1990, The Breeders, in addition to Kim, were: Tanya Donelly, formerly of Throwing Muses, on guitar and vocals; Josephine Wiggs, on bass and vocals; Britt Walford of Slint on drums, recording under the pseudonym of Shannon Doughton; and Carrie Bradley on violin. Steve Albini, who had already produced Surfer Rosa for Pixies, was brought in to lend his usual stern helping hand — and indeed, Pod sounds closer in style to Surfer Rosa than to Doolittle, because Albini does not like a lot of overdubs, and the ones he does like are either brutally sharp or even more brutally noisy. Here, there is definitely more sharpness than noise.

As you know, the Beatles have a symbolic song for everybody, and the Breeders are no exception: the sole lonesome cover here is Lennon's ʽHappiness Is A Warm Gunʼ, because it symbolizes Kim's major preferences: (a) nonsensical, but evocative (under pressure) lyrics; (b) indifference towards the usual verse-chorus approach to a pop song; (c) gloomy minor keys that may or may not make the jump to major, depending on how pissed you are; (d) an overall impression of stark psychological depth though you have no way whatsoever to explain what exactly is so deep about chanting "Mother Superior jump the gun" like a mantra. Anyway, with Albini onboard this sounds all too much like a Big Black interpretation of the Beatles, and they kind of lop off and subjugate the «optimistic» conclusion of the song, stripped all the way down to broken shards of guitar, among which Kim Deal is absentmindedly strolling barefoot, humming "happiness is a warm gun" like a recently shell-shocked individual. Hmm.

Now, about Kim's own songs... well, Kurt Cobain apparently found them a great inspiration, but unlike Kurt, Kim Deal is not prone to uncontrollable fits of anger or self-pitying with which it would be so easy for the average record-buying teen to associate. Instead, Kim just creates herself a droning wave, straddles it and rides it anywhere it turns out to take her: ʽGloriousʼ, opening the album, sets its general tone fairly well. You get your chug-chug-chugging bass, your one- or two-chord guitar riff, a noisy lead drone, and these weird «stuck-in-adolescence» vocals whose pro­genitor was Maureen Tucker of The Velvet Underground — one of the first ladies of rock who turned the skill of not knowing how to sing into a form of high art.

Of course, the Breeders have much more in common with the Velvets than just the voice: their propensity for droning, their ability to induce a state of «optimistic depression» without spending too much effort, or even Bradley's John Cale-imitating violin passages on ʽOh!ʼ. In terms of repetitiveness, they sometimes go beyond their mentors — for instance, having fallen upon a really cool-sounding bassline at the end of the upbeat ʽWhen I Was A Painterʼ, instead of trying to build up, they build down: first, there's a fuzzy guitar riff going along, then the guitar just disappears and we get fourty seconds of pure bass-drums groove. Somebody else would have employed that as an intro for a gritty rocker — they have it as an outro, because expectations are to be challenged and interpretations are to be sought after.

Then somewhere in the middle of all this befuddlement comes ʽFortunately Goneʼ, the closest thing they have here to a sweet, innocent twee-pop song — probably mighty influential, too, since you could think of it as the blueprint for all these intelligent girl-led pop bands like Allo Darlin'. It also gives away the whole concept of the album, perhaps, with its first line: "I wait for you in heaven / On this perfect string of love". Everything else makes no sense, but this "wait for you in heaven" is quite telling — you see, Kim Deal really plays this part of disembodied spirit, a solitary ghost accidentally lost somewhere in the back alleys of heavenly space, and this explains why commonplace layman emotions like «love», «anger», «sadness», or «happiness» do not really belong with The Breeders. (Nor did they belong with the Pixies, for that matter, but the Pixies were still far more «grounded» than this band.)

Actually, some of the common interpretations for their songs imply that there are fairly mundane subjects covered here, including some rather horrendous ones — ʽHellboundʼ is frequently re­ferred to as a song about a living abortion, allegedly acknowledged as such by Kim herself, but you would never know that without the commentary, and every time I hear that song, I prefer to interpret the "it" that "lives in folds of red and steamy air" not as an undelivered foetus but rather as... well... IT. IT lives, and IT is hellbound. To the grittiest and gloomiest guitar melody on the entire album, though even that one is not too gritty or gloomy. As the girls roll their eyes and go "hellbound hellbound hellbound hellbound hellbound", all you get is the inescapability of hell, but whether hell is such a bad place to be — well, ever since Bon Scott the question remains debatable, and one thing you are not ever going to get from the Breeders is answers. Answers are traps set by real artists for losers.

Although I have to confess from the start that I find myself much more personally attracted to the band's second album than their first one, its overall sound alone, just the way all the ingredients are combined and processed, guarantees a thumbs up from me. It also helps that it is merely thirty minutes long and that all the songs are so short — any more pretense and it would be in danger of becoming a Sonic Youth rip-off with sparser production and poorer playing.