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The Breeders – All Nerve (4AD)

March 5, 2018 by A.S. Van Dorston

It’s interesting that the first Breeders album in a decade came out this week. Inspired by watching documentaries on L7, The Gits and reading Carrie Brownstein’s memoir Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl (2015). They inspired flashbacks to the era of 1989-94 whether I was willing or not. As I addressed a few days ago in The Gits piece, it was a time filled with both excitement and tragedy. A quarter a century after some of those events, the good memories are finally able to compete with the jarring events.

Recently a great little essay about the band appeared on their site by one of my favorite writers, Neil Gaiman. “Music slices you in time.”

Slice One

I was an early fan of Pixies, having played Come On Pilgrim EP (1987) on my college radio show and Surfer Rosa when it came out in March 1988. When I saw they were scheduled to play the 7th Street Entry in June, I had a dilemma. I was only 18, it was a 21+ show, and had no fake ID. Luckily I knew one of the opening bands and was able to sneak in as a “roadie.” Pixies did not disappoint, they were like a sonic equivalent of the Tasmanian Devil on tequila and cocaine. After the show I was so stoked that when I saw Kim Deal at the bar I offered to buy her a beer. Since I looked closer to 16 than 21, I was unceremoniously booted out, as Deal laughed in her signature sandpaper cackle. No matter, I saw the Pixies and met Kim Deal! The future was wide open. Another slice, please.

Slice Two

Two years later the future brought me a pre-release cassette tape of Deal’s new “side project,” The Breeders, via a new friend Kristen, who had just moved from Boston and was friends Deal and the others. Already an accomplished pianist, my friend Jason was teaching her bass with hopes she would join his band. She said the tape would blow my mind. They were sitting in on my radio show, and I played the first track blind. “Glorious” didn’t crawl so much as ooze at a snail’s pace, had a sparse, stark sound as if were an unadorned demo, yet much more powerful than any demo I’d heard.  I eagerly listened to the rest that night, mind blown. There are some precedents to their sound, such as the minimalist Young Marble Giants, and Ohio indie rockers Scrawl were definitely an influence, along with Tanya Donelly’s band Throwing Muses. But with Steve Albini, who engineered Surfer Rosa, and (uncredited at the time as “Some Fuckin’ Derd Niffer”) Slint’s Tweez (1989), Pod had a more brutal, serrated edge. Slint’s drummer Britt Walford used the femine no de plume “Shannon Doughton.” The stark contrast of quiet and loud, expertly mic’ed drums were all there, signatures of Albini’s groundbreaking engineering work that spans through The Jesus Lizard, Slint, PJ Harvey and Nirvana.

In ’91 my bud Kristen was toying with putting a band together of three bassists and calling it Drool. I’d heard her play and she was already good enough to play in a band like The Breeders. I was toying around with her old bass in the basement and she kindly invited me to try out. I declined, not wanting to hold back the budding rock stars. That project never took off, but I could imagine how it would have sounded, as recorded by Albini. She ended up playing in a noise rock/post-hardcore band called Janitor Joe.

Slice Three

Having blown away three of the four Pixies albums with Pod, Deal justifiably struck out on her own, making Pixies her full-time gig. I did not love the alt-rock sheen of the production on Last Splash (1993), but it did add a subversive personality to MTV and the radio in an industry that otherwise was chasing entirely the wrong side of post-Nevermind copyists. A year later, the band was already struggling due to drug problems with the Deal sisters, Cobain had ended his life and my old friend Kristen died of an accidental overdose. She had been in Hole but was quitting, as she had been clean for a while, had the car packed up and was moving back to Minneapolis. Dark times. The third slice cuts the deepest.

Reocurring Slices

Not all endings are permanent, however, as The Breeders emerged battle scarred but not broken on Title TK (2002). Not unlike how Deal’s old friend Albini who records a new album with Shellac whenever they damn well feel like it, The Breeders could crank out an album roughly every decade as long as Deal chooses to. All Nerve definitely works off the Pod template more than Last Splash, despite the fact that this is a reunion of the lineup for the latter, and Albini engineered only three of the tracks. And while it’s hard to compare to that giddy time in 1993 when unlikely bands were getting modest commercial hits, I’d say this is their best album since Pod. What makes The Breeders so amazing is their ability to balance that fine line between menace and delicacy, bearing both broken hearts and bared teeth. The effect seems mystical, because it’s pretty rare when a band nails it. First example, on “All Nerve,” a very simple song with minimalist, spare arrangements and lyrics. It’s only 2:11, but when Deal sings in the second verse, “I hit the hull (oh god) / Oh god, I hit them all” it’s devastating. But just in case someone makes the mistake this is supposed to be tearfully cloying, the chorus is, “I won’t stop / I’ll run ya down / I’m all nerve.” Job done.

“MetaGoth” is another highlight, co-written and sung by Josephine Wiggs, based on a poem by her mother, with her bass thundering ominously. “Walking With A Killer,” a remake of a Deal solo single, has such a sweet, passive melody for lyrics that could just as easily be featured in a blackened death metal track — “I’m a dark star / I’m done . . . I would not survive / I didn’t know it was my time to die.” How much more badass can The Breeders get? A lot more. They proceed to cover Amon Düül II’s “Archangel’s Thunderbird” from their 1970 classic, Yeti.  Yes it was plenty audacious when they covered The Beatles and The Who, but this brings to light a cosmic psych gem to a new audience with Wiggs and MacPherson locking into a powerful groove. On “Howl At The Summit” they bring on some young blood with guest Courtney Barnett. “Dawn: Making An Effort” is so beautiful it’s mystical. The final two tracks feature more great, cryptic lyrics, Deal at her most enticingly enigmatic about crushing beetles on her lips and disrespecting monuments at the Acropolis.

At 33:50, All Nerve is their most concise album since Pod, and leaves me craving more. It’s a rare quality, when there is such an abundance of music coming out constantly, with albums often stretching up to three or four times this length. Breeders fatigue is never going to happen for me, and I’ll be spending some time revisiting the introspective Mountain Battles (2008) and Title TK. Pod, of course, had long ago sliced it’s way through my body into my soul, memories and DNA.

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