The Amps - Pacer

In the years after the Breeders record Last Splash, Kim Deal went home to the Midwest and drafted a few musicians to make a one off record of songs she had written. Initially, Kim Deal planned the Amps to be a solo project as she waited for her sister and fellow Breeder Kelley to finish her recovery from heroin addiction. Soon, the Amps flowered into a full-fledged band recruiting Breeders drummer Jim MacPherson and two local Dayton musicians, Deal recorded Pacer in the summer of 1995, releasing it in that autumn. Her typical style screams from every track, sometimes a bit too loudly. Appropriately, the album is raw, punky, and amateurish -- it's lo-fi garage punk. Not only does Deal sound recharged by recording with a new band in such a rushed atmosphere, she contributes her most immediate and bracing songs since Pod, the first Breeders album. But the key to Pacer is its primitive energy. From the brutally pounding "Empty Glasses" and the charmingly sleazy "Tipp City" to the singsong pop of "Pacer" and the fractured melodic rock of "Hoverin" and "Breaking the Split Screen Barrier," Pacer is exciting, gut-level rock & roll. Pacer somewhat recalls Deal’s earlier band Pixies, but only in the sense that both bands rely on amateurish enthusiasm to rock, and both bands have an off-kilter sense of song structure. 

The Amps - Tipp City

The Amps were an American alternative rock band formed by Kim Deal in 1995, while her band the Breeders went on hiatus. The group consisted of Deal, on lead vocals and rhythm guitar; Luis Lerma on bass; Nate Farley on lead guitar; and Jim Macpherson of the Breeders on drums. The group was named when Kim Deal started calling herself Tammy Ampersand, and the band Tammy and the Amps which eventually became The Amps. Releasing only one album, Pacer, which was recorded at several different studios, The Amps first session, at Easley Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, was engineered by Davis McCain and Doug Easley. Deal recorded several new songs, including what would later become Pacer's only single, "Tipp City". Following the Easley Studios session, recording for Pacer continued at six other locations in total, including studios in Chicago, Los Angeles, Dublin, and Deal's Midwest hometown, Dayton, Ohio. Engineers Steve Albini, John Agnello, Bryce Goggin and others each helped record one or more of these sessions. 

The Breeders - Mountain Battles

Released in 2008, Mountain Battles is generally viewed by critics as a minimalist, idiosyncratic, and quietly rewarding departure from the band's 1993 commercial peak, Last Splash. Produced by Steve Albini, the album is noted for its "lo-fi" and "un-produced" aesthetic. Critics describe the record as sparse, melancholic, and atmospheric. The Guardian noted it "meanders in rewardingly odd directions," while Uncut called it a "weird, awkward, slowly rewarding album." The album is famously eclectic, featuring songs in German ("German Studies"), Spanish ("Regalame Esta Noche"), and tracks completely lacking drums. Kim Deal's songwriting is praised for its "offhand charm" and "emotional truth". However, some critics at Drowned in Sound felt it lacked the "spark" of their earlier work, calling it a "gentle personal triumph" rather than a groundbreaking return.

Reviewed by Stuart Berman April 9, 2008

The follow-up to 2002's Title TK-- a tentative first step back into the public eye after nearly a decade of inactivity-- Mountain Battles finds Kim and Kelley Deal proudly flaunting their bull-headed perseverance and their familiar arsenal of quirks, hiccups, sputters, and enthusiasm.

It's generally bad critical form to reference the record company-supplied bio in a review, but the one-pager accompanying the Breeders' Mountain Battles is worth mentioning: It's written by Josephine Wiggs, who played bass on the band's first two albums but left in the late 1990s while the Breeders withered in a seemingly interminable state of inertia. That Wiggs has resurfaced after a decade to play the role of Breeders cheerleader speaks volumes about the kind of faith and goodwill Kim and Kelley Deal have accrued over the years, despite a career that's nearly derailed on more than a few occasions due to the sisters' well-documented substance abuse and the group's peculiar recording habits and revolving-door rhythm sections. After hearing Mountain Battles, Wiggs admits her reaction was: "Why aren't I playing on this album?" Her excitement is genuine-- Mountain Battles is indeed the best Breeders album since 1993's Last Splash.

Which, of course, isn't saying a helluva lot, given that the 15 years in between have produced but one official record: 2002's Title TK, whose nine-years-in-the-waiting build-up was far too great a weight for its brittle, often sluggish low-fi pop oddities to withstand. In lieu of a return-to-form, we simply had to be content with the fact that the Breeders had returned at all. However, in contrast to all the uncertainty that hung over the band pre-Title TK, the Breeders approached Mountain Battles from a position of relative stability, with bassist Mando Lopez, drummer Jose Medeles, and producer Steve Albini all returning for another go; the six-year gap between that album and Mountain Battles is easily accounted for by Kim's entry into rehab in 2002 and the subsequent Pixies reunion tours that kept her on the road for the better part of 2004-05. But true to the Breeders tradition of tellingly apropos album titles (the hermetically sealed claustrophobia of 1990's Pod, the breakthrough/burn-out of Last Splash, the work-in-progress feel of Title TK), Mountain Battles suggests that all those Pixies paychecks don't make the Breeders' business any easier. If Title TK was a tentative first step back into the public eye, Mountain Battles finds Kim and Kelley proudly venerating the Breeders' battle-scarred history and bull-headed perseverance.

Like Last Splash's "New Year", Mountain Battles' "Overglazed" is more intro than proper opener: Over an ascendant surge of swirling backward-looped guitars and crashing drums, Kim repeats the song's lone lyric-- "I can...I can feel it!"-- like someone who's just woken from a coma. Or, in her case, it's someone who's reconnected with a muse that only seems to appear every half-decade or so, which would explain her tendency to linger on a feeling: "Night of Joy" plays up the contrast between its sweet, girl-group melody and the song's hauntingly absent ambience (much like Kim's star cameo on Sonic Youth's 1995 creeper "Little Trouble Girl"); the optimistic rebirth narrative of "We're Going to Rise" playfully jibes with the song's lethargic waltz rhythm, as if slowing down the action lets her better savor the moment of peace.

With such deliberately spare presentation, Mountain Battles takes some time to warm up to (and new-wave toss-offs like "Bang On" still carry traces of Title TK's song-sketch incompletion), but then Kim and Kelley Deal's pretty sing-song harmonies and affable Ohio charm can distract us from how difficult the Breeders' music can be-- both for them as players and us as listeners. By this point, that very sense of struggle is intrinsic to the Breeders sound: It's pretty amazing that after all those years of line-up changes and aborted recording sessions, the Breeders pretty much sound exactly the same as they ever did, the quirks, hiccups, and sputters once attributed to a certain amateurish enthusiasm sounding ever more like purposeful components of their bubblegum bricolage. (See: the basement-Zeppelin chug of "No Way".)

No, there isn't a "Cannonball" here, but the buoyant, bass-driven strutter "Walk It Off" makes for a dandy companion piece to Pod's "Only in 3's"; Kelley's power-pop pick-me-up "It's the Love" gleams with a "Divine Hammer" shimmer; and the sisters' voices have never sounded finer than on the country-harmony duet "Here No More". But Mountain Battles' air of revitalization-- the thing that has Wiggs wishing she had her old job back-- is characterized not just by these straight pop shooters, but the apparent glee with which the Deals toss out the curveballs: the Teutonic-tongued oompa-loompa punk of "German Studies", the Spanish-sung slow dance "Regalame Esta Noche" and the bizarro rumble-in-the-jungle group chant of "Istanbul". Once upon a time, bands used to model their careers on copping the Breeders' moves (see: Salt, Veruca). Mountain Battles' greatest success is it makes that very idea seem once again like both an admirable ideal, and an unachievable one.

The Breeders - Title TK

The Breeders' Title TK (2002) is a raw, intimate, and often messy departure from the polished pop of Last Splash, heavily featuring the sparse production of Steve Albini. It is widely lauded for its indie-rock songwriting, featuring standout tracks like "Huffer," "Off You," and "Little Fury". Recorded with Steve Albini, the album features a clean, direct, and, at times, "bare-bones" sound. It is noted for its high-quality, authentic drum sounds and live feel. It is often described as a more mature, moody, and experimental, yet "disarmingly off-center" record. The album avoids reproducing the 90s pop sound of "Cannonball," instead focusing on "dirty melody". Key tracks include the fast-paced "Huffer," the sentimental "Off You," and the gritty opener "Little Fury".  While some critics found it less immediate than previous work, it was generally well-received for its spontaneous and unpolished charm. It is considered a "grower" that showcases Kim Deal’s songwriting strength after a long hiatus.

Reviewed May 30, 2002

Excuses, excuses. Kim Deal's got a million of 'em. How else could she manage to put off releasing her first original music in six years, not to mention following up on Last Splash, the radio and retail-friendly juggernaut from nine years ago?

"I haven't found the right drum sound," she'd say to engineer after engineer. "I'm going to take some time off and learn how to play the drums myself" (she's been working that one since 1995, when Tammy and the Amps-- Deal's basement solo project-- eventually became The Amps, with ex-Breeders drummer Jim Macpherson). "I can't do this without Kelley," she'd tell interviewers, despite having toured as the Breeders in 1997 with a Kelley-less lineup that included Macpherson, the Amps' Nate Farley, and violinist/vocalist Carrie Bradley. As engineers, studios and musicians were discarded as casually as cigarettes, and potential release dates came and went, the vultures-- and VH-1's Behind the Music-- started circling. Legend even has it that Kim Deal, having spent the Breeders' royalties and advance money long ago, has been living on fees generated by the Prodigy's "Firestarter," a song that, fortunately for Deal, sampled Last Splash's "S.O.S."

After years of being just around the corner like that Hopi Indian freak in Mulholland Drive, at last Title TK is upon us. And it's not bad. Far from being the chilly product of Deal's reputed perfectionism and production overkill, Title TK is a loose, spontaneous, even messy affair, and a blast to listen to once Deal's pop curiousities begin to take shape in the listener's imagination. Steve Albini should get a stipend from Nike for finally corralling Deal in his Chicago studio, convincing her to can the excuses and just do it.

"Round up, holler girl," are the first words from Kim Deal's mouth in six years, on opener "Little Fury," a rough-edged call-and-response with divebombing guitars, driving bass, and sister Kelley's dissonant harmonies. "Hold what you've got," Deal rasps on the chorus as hired guns Richard Presley and Mondo Lopez (of Los Angeles punk band Fear) and drummer Jose Medeles pound out a labored groove. Forget Last Splash and The Amps-- Title TK picks up where Pod left off in 1989, with a jagged sound nowhere near as tight as the Pixies' but a heartfelt enthusiasm for creating music. "Yeah, I'm leaking pure white noise," Deal sings on "London Song." It's not the most accurate statement, as this ain't exactly Merzbow, but it's an accurate reflection of what the Breeders are shooting for with Title TK: something uncomplicated, as pure and unaffected as static.

While the Thom Yorke school of songwriters, bored with conventional pop structures, slice their music apart and reconstruct it digitally like a Burroughs novel, Deal's latest compositions are disjointed by design-- trying on and chucking lyrical ideas and musical motifs with abandon, almost elevating ADD to a kind of art form. "Dumb as a fuckin'... and missing from the party," Deal sings in "Little Fury." Dumb as a fuckin' what? Attempting to decode Title TK's musical Mad Libs can be maddening-- it's easier to let Deal slur her words and catch the occasional fragments of brilliance that only weed-fueled midnight recording sessions and happy accidents can produce.

Title TK also finds Deal dabbling with new sounds, with hit-and-miss results. "The She" is built around a Stereolab-ish keyboard vamp, and while you shouldn't expect grooves as tight as Le Tigre's, the Breeders' rough-and-tumble brand of funk is convincingly nasty. But the silly slap-back percussion of "Sinister Foxx" and Record Engineering 101 channel-swapping guitars on "Huffer" aren't exactly cutting edge. Still, when the Breeders set out to rock-- and the chugging guitars and stomping drums of standout "Son of Three" will bring a knowing smile to Pixies afficianados-- they get the job done.

Title TK also contains two unexpectedly beautiful songs-- the disarmingly spare "Off You," with its lonesome guitar and gorgeous bass solo, is some of the creepiest headphone listening since The Wall. "I've never seen a starlet, or a riot, or the violence of you," Deal sings in a weary, muted voice. "I am the autumn in the scarlet, I am the makeup on your eyes." "Forced to Drive," a woozy travelogue bouyed by shimmering arpeggios and effects-pedal-to-the-metal choruses, merges Last Splash's summery hangover with the Velvets' "Ride into the Sun."

"Title TK" is journalistic shorthand for "title to come," and Title TK does feel incomplete in many ways-- from the hand-scribbled song titles on the back sleeve to the sometimes tuneless (and always somewhat haphazard) delivery of the vocals. Keyboards buzz from out of nowhere, guitars hit bum notes intentionally, basslines amble up and down the scale, sometimes two at a time. When Title TK loses people-- and I suspect it'll lose many-- it'll be with the langorous, abstract half-songs like "Put on a Side" (a listless anti-song built around a fretless bass groove, spare guitar and a single piano note) or "Sinister Foxx" (largely a meditation on the repeated phrase "Has anyone seen the iguana?").

And for an album so highly anticipated for so long, Title TK feels awfully skimpy, at just over 38 minutes, and pretty shamelessly padded. Did we really need the two false endings and an extended jam that stretches "London" past the three-minute mark? Or the rockabilly remake of The Amps' "Full on Idle," which barely deviates from the original? Isn't the two-minute "T and T" essentially just an extended instrumental intro to the short, sharp "Huffer"? Deal has been flogging many of these songs since that 1997 Breeders outing, including "Forced to Drive" (released on a fanclub single way back when), "Too Alive," and "Huffer." And what about Kelley's "Fire the Maid," a live favorite discarded from Title TK at the eleventh hour?

Still, it's a hell of a lot of fun to hear these fortysomething twins still singing about whippets and the quality of Jersey weed, and when the Breeders are on, they're still on. Just don't come to Title TK expecting the note-perfect pop confections of "Cannonball" or "Divine Hammer," because it's not that kind of record. And let's hope nobody samples Title TK on their big hit single, or it might be another ten years before the next one.

The Breeders - Pod

The Breeders' 1990 debut Pod is widely regarded as a raw, essential 90s indie-rock masterpiece, praised for its lo-fi, angular sound produced by Steve Albini. Featuring Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly, the album balances treacly melodies with abrasive, grungy noise, often described as more consistent than the Pixies. It is frequently highlighted for its unique, intimate atmosphere and standout tracks like "Iris," "Fortunately Gone," and a notable cover of "Happiness Is A Warm Gun". Recorded with Steve Albini, the album is known for its stark, "live" feel, with minimal overdubs and raw, driving rhythms. It is often described as both intimate and intense, blending "softish bursts of low-fi noise" with melodic sensibilities. Pod is considered a crucial, non-derivative debut that stands apart from Deal’s work in the Pixies, offering a unique, enduring contribution to alternative rock.

Reviewed at length By Judy Berman September 13, 2020

Sex may be the engine of pop music, but what of breeding? Nothing looks less cool (to those for whom the appearance of coolness is of prime importance) than changing diapers, starting a college fund, and being optimistic enough to believe in the long-term survival of the human species. More than that, though, even the word breeding carries the humiliating connotation of intimate acts performed in captivity, under surveillance. It makes the Breeders kind of a gross band name, as Kim Deal was well aware. “Back in the late ’80s, there was so much shit given to gay people,” she has said, “but at the same time gay people thought heterosexuality was disgusting, and I loved that.”

Although it dates back to Deal’s pre-Pixies teenage duo with twin sister Kelley, the moniker is eerily well-suited to the band’s debut album. Released amid the bursting buds of May 1990, Pod is vividly sensual and sexual without being sexy in an alluring sense, like the music of the era’s biggest pop stars: Madonna, Janet Jackson, Prince. It is also, in its close atmosphere as well as its lyrics, a little disgusting. Deal has described the record as a collection of “ugly, stinking gross songs.” One of the best of the bunch, “When I Was a Painter,” captures the record’s tension between intimacy and revulsion, describing a room thick with “bad sex and bad TV.”

Maybe it was this hermetic, almost fermented quality that kept the collaboration between Deal and Throwing Muses co-frontwoman Tanya Donelly from attracting nearly as much attention as they were getting in their more extroverted main gigs. In the 16 months between 1989’s Doolittle and 1990’s Bossanova, Black Francis barely needed to cough to have NME and Spin asking for a quote. But Pod was mostly dispatched with faint praise by that same rock press whose support was so critical to independent artists at the time. Just a few years later, by which time Donelly had left and Kelley had rejoined the lineup to replace her, alt-rock had become an unlikely music-industry gold rush. The Breeders’ sunnier, airier second album, 1993’s Last Splash, rode the “Cannonball” wave to platinum certification and relegated their earlier releases to footnotes. Only in retrospect did it become apparent how crucial Pod was in creating the necessary conditions for the Breeders—and so many other bands—to thrive.

Like so many underground bands that prominently featured women (the Raincoats, the Vaselines, Shonen Knife), the Breeders got a boost in visibility during the early ’90s through the effusive support of Kurt Cobain. Speaking to Melody Maker in 1992, the world’s biggest rock star explained: “The main reason I like them is for their songs, for the way they structure them, which is totally unique, very atmospheric. I wish Kim was allowed to write more songs for the Pixies, because ‘Gigantic’ is the best Pixies song and Kim wrote it.” The same year, Nirvana would take the Breeders on tour and Cobain would later admit to Deal, in a joint interview with UK ambassador to grunge Everett True, “I loved Pod so much that I was really freaked out to meet you.”

Much has been made of Cobain’s characteristically self-deprecating insistence that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was really just a Pixies rip-off, appropriating a dynamic that was “soft and quiet and then loud and hard.” But the influence of Pod seems to run even deeper in his music. Its sensibility is palpable not just in the song structures on Nirvana’s two major-label studio albums, or in their decision to hire Pod’s producer, Steve Albini, to record In Utero. (Though Albini also produced the Pixies’ debut album, Surfer Rosa, he has often expressed his preference for the Breeders. On Marc Maron’s WTF podcast in 2015, he opined that Deal was a “genius,” but “the Pixies, as a band, they were fine. Whatever.”) There is also a striking similarity between Cobain’s preoccupations and the themes of the Breeders’ debut: loneliness, disgust, trauma, sex, childhood, introspection, anatomy, intoxication, psychosis. The songs evoke isolation but never feel desolate, swaddled as they are, almost to the point of suffocation, in the warm, druggy, dissociative fog that the Cobain of In Utero would name “your magnet tar-pit trap” and “the comfort in being sad” and “a Leonard Cohen afterworld.”

Nothing could’ve been farther from the kind of music Deal and Donelly started out trying to make, the night they left a Sugarcubes show in 1989 determined to get rich off a dance hit. Unfortunately for their bank accounts, neither had a “Regina” in her. “We started it and figured out we couldn’t do it for beans,” Donelly told the L.A. Times in 1990. “We had no idea what to do.” They also realized that their existing record deals would prohibit them—both impressive songwriters whose contributions to their original bands were being minimized or overshadowed by bigger personalities—from sharing primary writing credits on any Breeders album. So they decided to take turns. Pod turned out to be a half-hour of brooding sketches Deal had already written. Donelly was supposed to be next, but her material got kicked far enough down the road that she wound up extricating herself from the Breeders and Throwing Muses’ fragile visionary Kristin Hersh to found Belly.

Deal recounted the often grotesque backstory behind each track in early interviews. “Glorious” opens the album with playful, preverbal babble, as the dual guitars wind around each other, Pixies style. Deal repeats the minimal chorus—“It’s glorious”—as if in a reverie, stretching the final syllable like she’s desperate to hold onto the word. This, apparently, is a song about being molested by an aunt; the tea she mentions in one verse is made of psychedelic mushrooms. Built on a skeletal bassline from Josephine Wiggs, formerly the bassist for onetime Pixies openers the Perfect Disaster, and fleshed out with meaty arena-rock riffs, “Hellbound” is the cartoonishly gory tale of a fetus that survives an abortion. In a less literal sense, Deal told Option, it’s “about creating stupid stuff, creating messes. Sometimes we all do dumb things and say, ‘Oh look, I've created an abortion and it lives.’” “Oh!” shares its languid, alt-country vibe with Mazzy Star, whose first album came out the same month as Pod. But what sounds like a delicate love song, softened by gentle backing vocals from Michael Allen of the Wolfgang Press and plaintive violin from Ed’s Redeeming Qualities co-founder Carrie Bradley, is allegedly about what it’s like to be an insect.

But this is information you can only really get from reading about the album. Though the lyrics are technically in English, it might as well have been recorded in a private language. When you’re actually listening to Pod, what resonates, more than any specific narrative, is the mood. Each line of Deal’s songwriting is a discreet smear of paint, legible in isolation or as part of the composite whole, but rarely as part of its immediate surroundings. “Fortunately Gone,” a concise little sock-hop jam that bounces atop drum beats from Slint’s Britt Walford (a last-minute addition to the group, on the advice of Albini), makes its torch-song wistfulness felt in Deal and Donelly’s sweetly overlapping vocals and in images like the one that opens the track: “I wait for you in heaven/On this perfect string of love.” Try to follow that train of thought through the next few lines—“And drink your soup of magpies in a/Pottery bowl that looks/As I am now, brown, round and warm”—and you’re lost. At the same time, “brown, round and warm” makes its own kind of sense; it describes the song’s sensory effect completely.

Pod can be so intensely physical as to test the line between exhilaration and obliteration. “Hour by hour!” Deal howls over and over as cymbals clang and guitars scratch on “Iris”—a track whose snarl contains the DNA of Hole’s blistering 1991 debut, Pretty on the Inside—and you’re imprisoned with her, watching the hands of the clock crawl. “Limehouse” is tactile in the extreme; so vivid it’s almost sticky, Deal’s description of how “warm black tar forms balls” cements the title’s reference to East London’s 19th-century opium district. Then she hands us the pipe as the interplay between verses creates a narcotic tunnel vision on one or two instruments between maximal choruses that whip the band into an ecstatic frenzy. “I’m in a lime house!” Deal keeps screaming, building up to sensory overload. There are plenty of charming hooks on Pod, but it’s most powerful at moments like this, with its lurid imagery amplified to the max and churned up by repetition into an annihilating force.

The Breeders’ shoegaze contemporaries also lived to overwhelm, but they required so much studio embellishment to get there. Albini, in his usual self-demoted capacity as engineer, did the opposite. After Deal and Donelly’s considerably bouncier demo tape convinced 4AD head Ivo Watts-Russell to invest $11,000 in the project, the band spent a couple weeks at Edinburgh’s Palladium Studios with Albini, who wrapped up the sessions early and sent them home with recordings that were slower, rougher and sludgier than the material they’d brought him. The isolation and darkness and physicality and rot had always been present in Deal’s songs. Just as he’d go on to do with many other classic alternative albums, from PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me to In Utero, Albini simply kept the Breeders from tempering the weirdness and abjection in what they’d created.

Yet Pod turned out to be every bit as inviting as it was creepy. As Albini understands it, “The two elements always at war in Kim’s music are prettiness and decadence, the deb and the dirtbag each holding a ladder for the other.” For all its rawness, his production also establishes intimacy. By weaving in snippets of casual studio conversation and abruptly halting tracks before they have a chance to get boring, he recreates the messy energy of a DIY show in the listener’s headphones. The album’s comforting aspects may have also reflected how pleasant the recording process was. Deal told stories about the band’s time in Scotland, rhapsodizing over “sheep walking along the front lawn of the house we were recording in,” and summing up the experience as “cozy, like going to winter camp, or being in a pajama party."

Whatever alchemy was at work, it made Pod the kind of record that feels like the listener’s own secret no matter how popular it gets. The Raincoats’ self-titled debut, the Shaggs’ Philosophy of the World or Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth—all Cobain favorites—have the same quality. With the partial exception of Nevermind, Nirvana albums are just the same: intimate, sensory, and psychological rather than cerebral or distanced. Deal articulated the difference between her music and the Pixies’ in 1990: “Do I write the same kind of songs as Charles? No! Get outta here! I don’t care about the Bible! I don’t care about UFOs!” You can imagine Cobain, who wrote about bodies and babies and heroin and feeling alone, heartily agreeing. If he shaped grunge, then the Breeders helped shape him. And he returned the favor, unintentionally, by creating a captive audience for their future releases.

I wish Deal got more credit for her impact on Cobain. It seems like a small thing, but Nirvana marked the convergence of mainstream and underground rock, catalyzing a permanent shift that only accelerated in the 21st century. And they’re usually placed in a lineage that begins with the Beatles, touches on punk and winds down with a list of mostly male ’80s indie acts: Mudhoney, R.E.M., the Meat Puppets, Pixies. Even as pop culture grows ever more eager to vanquish the appearance of sexism, we hear so little about how female musicians—or female artists in any medium—influence their male peers. It’s as though such a relationship would violate some natural hierarchy of creativity. And that’s one way pioneering women get written out of the history of their art form (see: Hilma af Klint, Clarice Lispector, Sister Rosetta Tharpe). It took Last Splash for the Breeders to win a place in the alt-rock canon, land of sold-out reunion tours and fat licensing checks. But without Pod, that canon might have looked very different.

The Breeders - Last Splash

The Breeders’ 1993 album Last Splash is widely celebrated as one of the most original and untethered alternative rock classics of the 1990s. Following Kim Deal’s departure from the Pixies, it solidified her as a dominant songwriting force in her own right. Often described as the "ultimate summer rock album," it captures a scrappy, carefree intimacy that blends indie-pop, punk, and surf-rock. Reviewers frequently highlight Kim Deal’s ability to pair sweet melodies with jarring, experimental twists. The album is praised for its analogue warmth and "happy accidents," such as the iconic, wonky bassline in "Cannonball".

Stevie Chick 2011

It’s a little known fact that The Breeders’ second album – a curate’s egg of twisted pop, weird art-rock textures and the kind of genius that makes sense to roughly 0.836% of the general populace – sold well enough to score a platinum disc in America (indeed, it now hangs in a corridor in Dave Grohl’s recording studio in LA). The Breeders had began as a side-project for Pixies bassist Kim Deal and Throwing Muses/Belly guitarist Tanya Donnelly; by the time Last Splash hit record shelves in 1993, however, Donnelly was long gone and the Pixies had folded, Deal taking charge of The Breeders and recasting them in the image she shared with twin sister Kelly.

Their debut, 1990’s Pod, was dark, magical, wonderful; its successor was all those things again, only with hooks. Lots of them. Scientific studies have proven that the album’s lead single, Cannonball, has enough hooks to rival many lesser bands’ Greatest Hits, and bloody wars have been started over just what the best part of the song is: the ghostly hums that open it, the loping bassline, the chugga-chugga guitar/drum breaks, the Deal sisters’ hypnotic harmonies on the chorus… It filled indie dancefloors upon release, and still does, and hooked unsuspecting alternateens into the Deals’ magical, subterranean world.

Last Splash would perplex many. Its pop moments were legion and wonderful, but scattered between spooky thrash-outs like New Year, drone-slaked drug-rock meanders like Mad Lucas and Roi, the gonzo surf-rock of Flipside, and squalling instrumental S.O.S. (later sampled by The Prodigy for Firestarter). Some were left baffled; others, though, were quickly seduced by Last Splash as a whole, its weird corners, its very uniqueness.

Last Splash was every bit the equal to the Pixies’ similarly idiosyncratic discography (to these ears, better). It confirmed Deal as a bewitchingly adept songwriter, effortlessly melodious and given to tempering her most sugary compositions with electrifying twists. Divine Hammer was perhaps the sweetest, most innocent ode to the appendages of well-endowed men ever committed to vinyl, while Do You Love Me Now?, which the Deals had been singing as a country ballad since their teens, captured a powerful longing with its mix of aching harmony and slow, crunching rock guitar. Alone, these songs could and did make grown indie-rockers weep; in context of the other varied treats that composed Last Splash, they illuminated the vast sprawl of The Breeders’ wonky pop universe, which remains, 33 years on, a great place to get lost for a while.

The Breeders - Divine Hammer EP + Cannonball EP

Following the success of their surprise hit, “Cannonball,” this second release from Last Splash provides a few more droplets of greatness from Ms. Deal and Co. A must have for any Breeders fan; the alternate version of “Divine Hammer” is enough to warrant the purchase of this single. “Hoverin'" is a ramshackle track that Kim wrote with ex-husband John Murphy, which she'd later flesh out on her Amps album. Ironically enough, about staying away from drugs, this song seems almost prophetic considering Kelley gets busted on possession one year after this single was released. Kelley harmonizes with her sister on a playful acoustic cover of the Hank Williams favourite, "I Can't Help It (If I'm Still in Love With You)." This track recalls the original incarnation of the Breeders when the Deal sisters were a busking folk duo playing truck stops around Ohio. Ending the disc, Dinosaur Jr. frontman J Mascis adds vocals to a third reading of "Do You Love Me Now?"

Now I say this about a lot of songs, but this really is a collection of brilliant, scintillating moments that combined are more than a song. The opening "ah-wooooooo-ooh"s send shivers down my spine (fun fact: that particular sound was created by putting a styrofoam cup over the mic). The slippery riff and unconventional lyrics of "Cannonball," the first single from their album, Last Splash, tossed the Breeders into the spotlight. There are no less than three epic riffs: the immortal bassline, the easy charm of the guitar riff, the powerfully chugging other guitar riff, the brief peal of feedback sounding like a distorted whistle being blown. And that's all before the verse starts! The song then rides along the groove it's established until the chorus, which explodes with energy before going back to singsong poppy sweetness. It's as good as the best songs by Kim Deal's old band, and it really should be acknowledged as such. With a trio of B’sides. "Cro-Aloha" is a rough, early take of "No Aloha," countering the angelic album version. Josephine Wiggs steps up to the mic for the dark and self-penned "900" as well as a nice cover of Aerosmith's "Lord of the Thighs." These are treats for Breeders buffs, but nothing essential for the casual listener.

Finally, two more rabbits pop out of "Cannonball"'s hat that deserves mentioning:

1. "The bong in the re-gay-sawng..." -beat- *CHUGGACHUGGACHUGGACHUGGA*

2. "On the laaaaaast splaaaaaash~"