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The Breeders
Mountain Battles
4AD
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Article
written by Matt H
Mar 16, 2008.
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| The Breeders - Mountain Battles |
Ah, the start of the 90s. When the music press still happily thought that they could get away with lead articles bringing panels together to opine on the non-issue of "Can Women Rock?". Kim Deal and her Breeders didn't seem to care a jot about the question let alone the conclusion, delivering the still astonishing, often barely there, Pod and going as far as to use Jo Wiggs' Home Counties deadpan mercilessly to lampoon Aerosmith. The irony of course is that when they wanted to (even when thieving wholesale off Led Zep and Link Wray) the Breeders rocked as hard as any, and indeed Kim Deal had more rock 'n roll in her fag-balancing little finger than one hundred of her callow guitar-boy peers could muster between them.
With rather too much rock 'n roll excess survived, the current incarnation of the Breeders has produced, nearly two decades on, a record that neatly captures all the aspects that made them so compelling and a few more to boot. That's even though opener Overglazed (a perfect shogazer song title that was somehow missed by the Breeders' original contemporaries) find Deal calling out "I can feel it" as if she spent that period in a field with a whistle round her neck rather than in smoky clubs.
Although the sound is fuller, the otherworldly, slightly detached, feel of Pod overlays the songs. Night of Joy sounds like it might drift away entirely if you try to catch it and the title track stutters and almost forgets to exist at all. Elsewhere, while the off-kilter harmonies and slipback rhythms so familiar from the past are present and correct, there's all sorts of odd sounds creeping in. The almost funky rhythm section of Bang On sounds like it's coming through the wall from next door, Istanbul phones in its slight and disjointed eastern influences over a soporific chant . While heavy on the atmospherics, the current band also lob in the odd perfectly scratty garage-pop stomper like It's the Love. All in all it's a majestic and assured collection of songs - they even manage to hold their dignity when commiting the pop faux pas of singing in a language foreign to them on Regalame Esta Noche (go on then, name one artist that has really pulled it off for a whole song).
It's clear that a generation or three of musicians, both male and female, have drawn inspiration from the Breeders and yet they still rarely sound like anyone else. The sheer quality of Mountain Battles suggests that not only is it OK to go back sometimes, it can be magnificent.
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