Wheeling and Dealing

There’s a lot of things that spring to mind when you think of the Breeders, but unabated enthusiasm is perhaps not one of them. Nevertheless, we find Kelly Deal and drummer Jose Medeles in what can only be described as fierce form, positively sunny in the face of a decidedly lukewarm critical response to new album Title TK and a series of interviews that invariably all begin with the same question.

“People say, ‘what you been doing for nine years?’ and the thing is, what do you think we’ve been doing?” babbles Deal down the phone. “Dealing with personal stuff, dealing with other band member stuff and getting music together for more albums”.

That ‘personal stuff’ included various addictions that, while not tearing the band apart, certainly reduced the Breeders to nothing more than a duo of Kelly and twin sister Kim – the two even venturing out live in that particular format.

All of which goes to explain just why Title TK has taken so long to emerge. Three of the tracks stem from the original days of the project, when the sisters were attempting to make the album on their own, as Kelly explains. “Once we started to record, Kim was looking for a specific sound on drums. She was having real trouble trying to get a good feel from a drummer but she just wasn’t getting it. There were lots of reasons, I’m sure some of them were her exacting opinions that people can’t relate to and some was people just not getting it. So she taught herself how to play drums and played on the tracks. But that meant, if we wanted to go out and play it live we’d had to get these session dudes in, which was just what we wanted to try and avoid. We did those three songs and took a break and then Kim met Richard and Mando at the beginning of 2000”.

Thus Richard Presley and Mando Lopez, from veteran LA punkers Fear, were drafted in with Jose to allow the recording process to begin in earnest, under the watchful eye of Steve Albini and under the philosophy of ‘all wave’ – a determination to record without resorting to computers or digital equipment of any kind. Not as hard as you might think these days, according to Jose.

“When it comes to mastering because there are only three places that use non-digital equipment and it costs a lot of money. As far as recording wise, no, there’s still a ton of places that record on analogue. Obviously for a short time everybody wanted to go to Protools because that was the new thing, it was cheaper and you could get everything perfect. Kim just wanted to go analogue all the way.”

Kelly, on the other hand, is not entirely convinced that this move has been fully appreciated.

“We’ve had people say that this record sounds ‘vintage’ or ‘lo-fi’. This is not a lo-fi record. Steve Albini is precision recordist, he is a professional, and he knows sound up one side and down the other. I love lo-fi but this is not a four-track recording in a basement that cost $20, this is a real record. I like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers but on that ‘Californication’ record, you can hear his voice being manipulated by Protools. You can actually hear it. They’ve always been about samples and adding a bunch of stuff, which had never bothered me before, but that did bother me”.

Whether the band will continue with this approach, one that will necessarily take them even further away from their brief dalliance with the mainstream, is a mystery – not least to Deal herself.

“I don’t think we ever make a conscious decision – ok, we’re going to make a pop record or we’re going to make a really depressing record. This is not a party record; it was never ever going to be that way. There was nothing you could have done to make it one. I can’t tell you what the next record will be like”.

Despite all the talk of a revival in rock’s fortunes, bands like the Breeders will probably always stand apart from the homogenised rebellion that dominates the charts in 2002, no matter what direction they take. “That’s true,” says Kelly. “I was talking to a cabby last night who was waxing poetic about the old days of rock, how England’s rock music sucks. He was talking about how he liked Papa Roach, Staind, Nickelback. It was really weird how he was saying that the scene over here was so bad, because that’s just from his viewpoint. From my American viewpoint, yeah, we get rock music but it’s Staind, Nickelback, Papa Roach. To be honest, I don’t know enough about those bands to like them or dislike them. I just don’t listen to them”.

Much as we’d like to buck the critical trend on Title TK and declare it a classic, we can’t. At it’s worst, the album is messy and unfocussed. At it’s handful of high points, however, it offers hope not only for the Breeders themselves but also for the spirit of innovation that bands like the Pixies (yes, it is impossible not to mention them in the same breath) and their ilk introduced all those years ago. Perhaps we should just be grateful that the sisters Deal kept it together long enough to make the record in the first place but we know that they can do better. Here’s hoping that next time round they can prove it.