It’s strange that it’s taken The Breeders nine years to make a new record. Unlike such musical procrastinators as Kevin Shields, Trent Reznor and Axl Rose, the joy of The Breeders was in their offhanded brilliance. The early-’90s classic Last Splash wasn’t an overproduced monster, but a gleeful short-attention-span romp that made goofing off sound inspired. But according to the press surrounding the band’s new record, title TK (Elektra), Kim Deal has turned into a bit of an obsessive control freak, which—in addition to her and her sister Kelley’s struggle with drug addiction—is what left The Breeders in limbo.
Instead of a welcome breath of experimental fun like Last Splash, title TK reflects the apparent aimlessness of nine lost years. The Breeders are now just Kim, Kelley and members of the L.A. punk band Fear, who do an able job but lack the certain spring that former members Josephine Wiggs and Jim MacPherson brought to their playing. More distressing are the somber, plodding songs. Only a handful pick up the pace—such as “Son of Three” and “Full on Idle”—but even these feel halfhearted.
Matters aren’t helped by Steve Albini, whose production skills have always been a crapshoot. The colorful guitar orgy of Last Splash disappears, replaced by a monochromatic style as dour as Albini himself. The only things that distinguish the album are Kim and Kelley’s neck-hair-raising, boyish girl harmonies and the killer final track, “Huffer.” Bounding along with unbridled joy, “Huffer” is less than two minutes and feels like it was thrown on at the last minute. Much of title TK sounds as uninvolving and lazy as its title, but this one song may be an indication of newfound promise—one that I hope The Breeders will follow up on very soon.
—Ben Taylor
Credit former Crowded House landlord Neil Finn with the ability to work against type. Not only did the relentlessly melodic New Zealander issue an adventurous, palette-expanding solo debut (1998’s Try Whistling This), but his follow-up, One All (Nettwerk), further confirms his initial reason for dissolving Crowded House—too much laurel-resting. While nothing as immediate as the previous album’s ecstatic “She Will Have Her Way” or the haunting, baroque trip-hop of “Sinner” emerges here, One All is just as inventive, if a bit subtler and earthier. On the standouts “Rest of the Day Off,” with its buoyant groove and supple turns of phrase, and the shimmering epilogue “Into the Sunset,” several familiar glimpses arise of the pop classicism that made his former outfit’s Woodface one of the ’90s’ most bracing and memorable records. But it’s the more understated tracks that provide the real surprises. In particular, the darkly hued slow burn of “The Climber” and “Last to Know”—the latter a breezy waltz featuring former Prince co-conspirators Wendy and Lisa (!)—portray the still vital Finn as contentedly and elegantly recharged.
—Jonathan Flax
Kevin Russell’s first band, The Picket Line Coyotes, were a thrashed-out unit capable of offending everyone in the room. In the early ’90s, PLC moved from North Louisiana to Austin, where Russell formed The Gourds, a comparatively respectable outfit that has thus far cranked out six CDs. Russell’s first solo effort, Buttermilk and Rifles (Sugar Hill), released under the name Kev Russell’s Junker, takes as its starting point The Gourds’ “Carter Family Meets the Minutemen in South Texas” formula. Russell’s Gourd bandmates make guest appearances, and songs such as “Way Fallen Stranger” and “Sam Morgan” bear their unique, rustic-acid instrumental stamp.
As with his Gourds material, Russell’s lyrics on Buttermilk and Rifles are nursery-rhyme obscure yet evocative, as in this verse from “Sam Morgan”: “Stone in his mouth he slept in a burnin’ bush / Down in Loozyann / He once killed a man with a Chevy Stegosaurus / Down in Loozyann.” Instrumentally, tracks such as “Virgin of the Cobra” and “Ashes in M’Beard” make an amped-up departure from The Gourds’ more acoustic work. The former has Russell wailing, “I like yer vine, it smells like soda / On the powerline, looks like virgin of the cobra,” over a hip-hopped New Orleans second-line groove.
Russell recorded Buttermilk and Rifles on the PC-based Pro Tools system, and the disc features spare use of such other un-Gourd like devices as drum loops and samples. What he proves on this first solo outing is that the use of such wizardry shouldn’t necessarily be equated with the term “slick.” Buttermilk and Rifles retains the bone-dry, front-porch intimacy of The Gourds’ best work while also giving us a glimpse into Kevin Russell’s anachronistic, wayward world.
—Paul Griffith
In brief
Oddball one-man-band Gary Wilson recorded the new wave lounge record You Think You Really Know Me (Motel) back in 1977, crafting a cult classic that’s just made it onto CD. With his atonal interludes, echoey vocals, slinky electric piano and minimalist, sputtered lyrics about girls, Wilson comes off like an avant-garde Japanese pop version of Billy Joel. Fans of rock ephemera should jump all over it.... Gomez’s third LP, In Our Gun (Virgin), is their first thoroughly enjoyable record. The band’s slide-guitar-washed, groove-heavy version of Britpop has always suffered from too much intellectual remove, but the new album integrates touches of Radiohead-style atmospherics into a set of songs that are on the whole short, loose and potent. The energized, unpredictable mix of catchy instrumental nuggets, chant-like singing, funky rhythms and brief snatches of chaotic electronic noise compares with Wilco’s majestic Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in its dual sense of beauty and confusion. Gomez may lack Wilco’s dart-to-the-heart compositional skills, but songs like the woozy “Ruff Stuff,” the gently cresting “Sound of Sounds” and the hat-in-the-air “Ballad of Nice & Easy” have their own incandescent glow.
—Noel Murray
