The Breeders - Mountain Battles
(4AD)
http://www.4ad.com/breeders

It’s quite difficult to review Mountain Battles with a time constraint; Breeders albums just don’t work that way. Usually what happens is that I listen to it a couple of times and then put it away for a bit, slowly putting it on when I’m doing other things: cooking, reading, putting things in alphabetical order. And slowly the album begins to work. Like Pod, Last Splash and certainly Title TK, Mountain Battles doesn’t really go anywhere. The songs start and stop before you’ve had a chance to get to know them, like a chance encounter, an unexpected trip; the meaning isn’t there when you get to the end. You have to go back and work out what you were doing.

Superficially, therefore, let me say this is a cracking record. Those expecting a Cannonball sized single track lurking in the middle will be disappointed however; the band stubbornly refuse to give one up. And why should they? There’s plenty of cracking old tricks here: blissed out vocals (Night Of Joy), clunky guitar sludge (Spark), big beats (Walk It Off), bass noise (Mountain Battles). There’s even a song in Spanish that would sound good in a David Lynch movie.

And holding the record together is Kim Deal’s voice; as nasally, sweet and filthy as it was on Gigantic all those years ago now! She sounds like a child sometimes, but not in the cutesy Regina Spektor sort of way that is all too easy to start hating. Deal’s is the voice of the spooky kid who got caught masturbating in the tree house.

Elsewhere on the album, Here No More could have been recorded in a scratchy barn by The Carter Family, though acts as a prelude to the garage drone of No Way. It’s a schizophrenic record in some ways, though this will probably work itself in time (see above). Unlike Title TK, however, there is not as much edge to this record. If anything, it’s quite sweet. Make of that what you will. I loved it.

Tom Sutton