Monday, April 28, 2014

#1243 The Breeders - Pod

When Kim Deal split off from The Pixies and joined The Breeders there was a reality fracture: in one timeline The Breeders took the Pixies' poppier, hookier trajectory to its logical conclusion and made the immediate, gratifying The Last Splash. In the other timeline, they made an album that rejected the Pixies' melody and rage and stretched the arty tension to just-near-breaking, trucking in tension and eternally unresolved anticipation. Somehow we're living in some gagglefuck timeline where both happened.

Pod's most natural point of comparison is Sonic Youth: these songs simmer and twitch near-imperceptably. And while they don't commit SY-hard to static structures, the climaxes that they foreshadow come in halfpowered, upside down, or not at all, everything stewing and smoldering. It's a fascinating as an artifact, but it's damned unpleasant to listen to, an exercise in denial. I'd rather just get the payoff 2.5/5

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