The Breeders - All Nerve (2018) [Official Digital Download 24-bit/96kHz]

Every time an old and much-missed music vanguard is returning, especially when it is armed with new music to boot, the arrival becomes a cause for celebration. Just like how stout enthusiasts of Alternative Rock music should be feeling excited for the resurgence of The Breeders’ classic lineup of Kim Deal (lead vocals, guitar), Josephine Wiggs (bass, vocals), Jim Macpherson (drums, percussion), and Kelley Deal (lead guitar, vocals), with also a new album in tow. With All Nerve’s twists and turns, signals and noises, and trademark aural dynamics, The Breeders are definitely back. Despite the ’90s Alternative Rock sonic regalia that they wear like a badge of honor, they are also equally proud to adorn themselves with the current paraphernalia of the genre that they helped propel quarter of a century ago.

A sense of “What if?” hangs over the career of Kim Deal. It seems a strange thing to say about someone who’s been a member of not one but two seminal rock bands, an alt-rock figure so beloved that journalists unironically open profiles of her with the words “It is not possible to overstate the importance of Kim Deal” and to whom everyone from Kurt Cobain to Courtney Barnett has paid homage. Nevertheless – what if Pixies frontman Black Francis had acceded to Cobain’s public suggestion that he “allow” Deal to write more songs for the band? The Pixies’ later albums would have been bolstered by the material that Deal used in her side project the Breeders, the band’s internal strife might have pacified, and arguably the most influential rock band of the 80s might have ended up as commercially successful as they were critically acclaimed. And what if the Breeders hadn’t dissolved in dissolute chaos after their second album, 1993’s Last Splash, sold a million copies? Who’s to say they wouldn’t have ascended to the kind of perennial arena-packing success enjoyed by some of their peers? They certainly had the songs, and in Deal a frontwoman so self-possessed and charismatic she didn’t need to do anything much beyond get on stage in her everyday clothes to magnetise an audience. Instead, there was rehab, a lineup that one member left “for my own mental health”, sporadic, understated subsequent albums – 2002’s minimal Title TK and 2008’s introspective Mountain Battles – and the consolation that, as Breeders producer Steve Albini noted, the “whole deal could have turned out infinitely worse”: among their contemporary graduates from alt-rock cultdom to platinum success were Alice in Chains and Soundgarden. Now, the lineup that made Last Splash has reassembled, bassist Josephine Wiggs marking her return with an icy, perfectly enunciated vocal on MetaGoth, her voice at odds with the warm, husky intimacy of Kim and Kelley Deal’s harmonies.

The album isn’t intense in the “raging guitar noise” sense of the phrase. Songs frequently unravel into stillness before gathering themselves up again, and there’s something tense and deliberately contained about even the brashest stuff here. You expect opener Nervous Mary to explode cathartically, but it never does; Spacewoman switches from quiet to loud in patent style, but does so at an oozing pace. The best material might be the most spectral: Walking With the Killer and the beautiful, barely-there shimmer of Dawn: Making An Effort. But there’s a real concentrated power about its sound, which is intimate and raw, befitting its title: the vocals close-miked, the band recorded in such a way that they sound as if they’re playing live a few feet away from you. For an album full of space and silence, it’s remarkably relentless and weighty – maybe not the stuff of arena-packing success after all, but formidable enough that, while it plays, what ifs seem beside the point.

Tracklist:

01 - Nervous Mary
02 - Wait in the Car
03 - All Nerve
04 - MetaGoth
05 - Spacewoman
06 - Walking with a Killer
07 - Howl at the Summit
08 - Archangel's Thunderbird
09 - Dawn Making an Effort
10 - Skinhead #2
11 - Blues at the Acropolis

Musicians:
Kim Deal - vocals, guitar
Kelley Deal - guitar, vocals
Josephine Wiggs - bass
Jim MacPherson - drums


Thanks to the Original customer!