The Breeders
This spring has brought an embarrassment of riches for Music City indie heads, The Spin included, with sets from San Diego garage punks Hot Snakes, New Jersey polymaths Yo La Tengo and most recently the pride of Dayton, Ohio, The Breeders. They’ve all come through town in the past six weeks, drawing audiences from all over the South. Even sweeter yet, these veteran acts are touring behind albums that meet the bar set by their essential past work — The Breeders especially with their new jam All Nerve, as they showed an adoring, near-capacity crowd at Cannery Ballroom Thursday.
Melkbelly
Openers Melkbelly were a lot of fun. On record, the coed Chicago foursome sounds like obvious Breeders descendants. But their brief set was much more intense than any ’90s pastiche we’ve heard, with knotty guitar lines, rapidly increasing tempos, feedback squalls and megaton fuzz blasts reminiscent of early-Aughts greats Lightning Bolt.
The Breeders
How else to say it? Kim Deal is a national treasure. The Breeders bandleader (and former Pixies bassist-vocalist) fills every room she steps into with her gregarious presence, thousand-watt smile and impossibly cool singing voice, which is somehow sounding better than ever lately. The same goes for her twin sister, guitarist-vocalist Kelley Deal, and the group's rhythm section of Josephine Wiggs (bass) and Jim Macpherson (drums). Now, as in the group’s first heyday, Wiggs and Macpherson hang back by choice, but keep a remarkably consistent motorik beat for the sisters' jigsaw guitars to dip in and out of.
We already knew All Nerve was great, but on Thursday we found out just how well it dovetails with material off the band's 1993 alternative classic Last Splash, this lineup's last record together. This was particularly apparent with the shrewd pairing of pastoral road-trip songs “Drivin' on 9” (old) with “Walking With a Killer” (new) midway through the set, and Nerve opener “Nervous Mary” and Splash's similarly grungy “Saints” during the encore. Hearing them in the live setting also helped us make sense of some of the more inscrutable numbers off the new record, including the vaguely doomy, psychedelic “Spacewoman” and austere “MetaGoth,” sung by Wiggs. Last Splash's jangly “Divine Hammer” remains swoon-worthy after all these years, while “Cannonball,” the group's breakthrough hit, still kicks any party into high gear. We even got, somewhat unexpectedly, Kim Deal taking back her quintessential Pixies tune “Gigantic” — something long overdue. No disrespect to Frank Black, but it's baffling to think anyone could consider replacing her in a band, and this miscalculation on his part seems to have contributed to The Breeders becoming the consensus preference among fans of the two bands in recent years.
The Breeders
It's no minor accomplishment to just plug back in and recapture a sound after so much time apart, but The Breeders do it with effortless informality, as if they're having all 1,000-plus of us over for beers and hangs at their jam space. In between songs Thursday, there was nerding out about pedals with audience members, debating with each other which songs to play next, and plenty of good-natured needling between the sisters, who share not just an awe-inspiring mind-meld when they sing together, but a rapport something all siblings — in bands or not — should be so lucky to share. The unwavering mood throughout the set was pure, unabashed joy, an always-welcome reminder that this is supposed to be fun, above all else.
See our slideshow for more photos.
In The Spin — the Scene's live review column — staffers and freelance contributors review concerts under a collective byline.
