Artist bio

See also: Pixies, The Amps

The Breeders began life as the high-school band of twin Ohio sisters Kim and Kelley Deal. By the late '80s, Kim was playing bass in underground icons Pixies, but her songwriting was increasingly being pushed aside by frontman Black Francis. Kim decided to use some of the songs she had been writing to fuel a side project, and enlisted Throwing Muses guitarist Tanya Donnelly, Slint drummer Britt Walford and Perfect Disaster bassist Josephine Wiggs to flesh out the Breeders' first record, Pod, without her twin sister.

Three years later, the Pixies were no more, disbanded officially when Francis sent a release to the press. When Kim heard the official word, she was on her way to California to record the Breeders' second album, Last Splash, which would ironically go on to outsell each of the Pixies albums in good time. The band now reintroduced Kelley, as Donnelly moved on to start Belly. Walford was replaced by sticks stalwart Jim MacPherson.

The group found big success and toured Lollapallooza with George Clinton and the Smashing Pumpkins that summer, but had trouble keeping the ball rolling, disintegrating into the Amps, the Kelley Deal 6000, and other groups over the next few years. Kelley had bouts with heroin addiction, MacPherson bolted for Guided By Voices and then family life, and Kim struggled to write and record a new Breeders album many times. But in 2002, the sisters finally got it back together, and with the help of three friends from their new home of East Los Angeles, Breeders MK 3 released Title TK and wrote another chapter in their musical careers and lives.

Albums by this artist

Title TK (2002)

Last Splash (Recommended) (1993)

Safari (1992)

The Breeders

Last Splash

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» MARK T.R. DONOHUE | STAFF WRITER

NATN Recommended The Breeders Last Splash 4AD/Elektra, 1993 RiYL: Pixies, Rilo Kiley, Guided by Voices

While the early 90's was an important time for the status of female rock musicians both in the mainstream and the underground, few of the breakthrough women artists of this period retrospectively are as revolutionary as they then seemed. Tori Amos at first seemed like a bold and uncompromising female pop star but quickly retreated to the safer and less challenging position of inscrutable cult figure. Liz Phair made one great record, one okay one, and then had a baby and her brain turned into mush. Veruca Salt made a promising debut album and then promptly broke up when its co-leaders got into a feud over boyfriend-stealing. Riot grrl for all of its fierce energy was kind of an artistic dead end. Courtney Love's overexposed antics set the cause of equality for girls with guitars back 25 years.

Seemingly no one was willing or able to take the next step, and pop's most enduring female spokeswomen continued to operate on the Madonna model, being media figures first and legitimate musicians a distant second. A missed opportunity to be sure.

Perhaps no failure to seize the moment was more disappointing than the Breeders'. On paper their career looks less ephemeral than it really was thanks to the album and EP they made before Last Splash and the random flurries of activity they've had every so often since, but Pod and Safari are thin records even for side projects and the entirety of the post-Splash stuff is negligible. It's most accurate, though disheartening, to remember Last Splash as the shooting star it really was. For the summer and fall of 1993, a female-led band with impeccable indie rock credentials owned MTV and modern rock radio.

The Breeders were outliers in a lot of ways. Kim Deal became a college rock demigoddess (commemorated wryly by the Dandy Warhols tune "Cool as Kim Deal") by neither hiding her gender (as Mo Tucker and Tina Weymouth did) nor making it her sole defining characteristic. The band name suggests more of an in-your-face feminism than any of Deal's songs ever did. Indeed, the Breeders' most influential trait was that they were a mostly female band who were almost entirely influenced by the indie rock boys' club.

Deal's biggest influence was and always would be her former bandmate Frank Black, but the Breeders also drew heavily on the searing guitars of Steve Albini's Big Black, the elliptical, momentum-defeating compositions of Slint, and the daft sheep-surf rhythms of New Zealand bands like The Clean, The Chills, and The Bats. The dream-pop inclinations of the influential British label 4AD and its numerous female-led bands largely left the Breeders along with founding guitarist Tanya Donnelly.

What's left is an album of imaginative, fragmented pop jolts that bury Deal's steady vocals in all kinds of joyful guitar noise while Jim MacPherson's eminently professional drumming gives the songs firm shape. "Cannonball" is one of the stranger Top 40 hits in history, with its creepy distorted whistles and Kelley Deal's elementary slide guitar licks entirely outstaged by Josephine Wiggs' all-time great bassline. Elsewhere chugging guitars match up well with Deal's romanticism on "Do You Love Me Now?" and "Invisible Man," while the experimental "No Aloha" and "Mad Lucas" are distinguished by deliciously weird, upside-down mixes.

The utterly convincing countrified "Drivin' on 9" reveals unexpected depth in Deal's singing ability. Only the overexposure of "Cannonball" kept "Divine Hammer," with the Deal twins' sweet harmonies and Wiggs' aggressively melodic bass, from being an even bigger hit. Even with all these successes the best song on Last Splash is the mostly instrumental, almost-metal "Roi," where Deal and Deal generate enough psychedelic guitar mass to put the Spacemen 3 to shame.

While it easily rivals the Pixies' weaker albums and is certainly better than anything Frank Black has yet generated solo, Last Splash lacks the every-one-a-winner genius of Deal's old band's best. The two surf instrumentals seem as extraneous as the nothing-added reprise of "Roi." Kelley's songwriting debut "I Just Wanna Get Along" is bad, but not so bad it's good. "Saints" as a third single was a hollow imitation of the first two.

One of the biggest shames about the Breeders' rapid disappearance after Last Splash is the effect it has had on our collective memories of the record. Like Tanya Donnelly's Belly, the Breeders deserve better than being perceived as a vaguely risible one-hit wonder. That said, I can't deny that "Cannonball" still makes me happy every time I hear it. What's relatively forgotten is that the rest of the record is on the same level as the smash single. If you've still got a copy lying around somewhere, go back to it with fresh ears.

MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.