Night Music: The Breeders, “German Studies”

The Breeders, as a concept, was a band Kim Deal and her twin sister imagined when they were kids, and they learned how to play so they could make it a reality when they got older. But Kim Deal’s adult life has been divided between her work with the Breeders (whose great album Last Splash is 20 years old this year, and they’ve been touring and playing it in its entirety) and the Pixies (as well as a detour with her solo band, the Amps, whose one album was played a lot on my cassette player when it came out). So Breeders albums have come out with lengthy intervals in between each release. The most recent, from 2008, is called Mountain Battles. Winding down our week of authentic sounds, please note that it was engineered by Steve Albini.

But it is perhaps useful to point out that Kim Deal started her own recording purity movement, called All Wave, which abjures any use of computers or digital equipment, up to and including mastering. Presumably not including CD production. Mountain Battles sounds just fine streaming digitally out of my computer into my headphones (Grado analog), but I bet the vinyl version sounds better.

3 thoughts on “Night Music: The Breeders, “German Studies”

  1. Do boys and girls do abrasive differently? I think so. Boys go for the throat, girls pile on the subtlety. Whether this is genetic or learned I couldn’t tell you. I also think it’s interesting that most of the Sonic Youth-influenced bands often sound better than Sonic Youth, a highly erratic band IMHO. Here’s a band clearly influenced by The Breeders and Sonic Youth, with their own girl-group/church choir thing going on in there somewhere. From Peter’s own Brooklyn, NY, the Vivian Girls:

    • It’s funny, I was going to post the Vivian Girls day before yesterday, but when you found the Pillows’ “Kim Deal” I thought it only fair to close the circle with Kim Deal’s Breeders engineered by Albini. So, you beat me to the punch.

      I’m going to have to think about how boys and girls rock. I’m sure that the expectations we bring to each is different, set and setting and all that, and it colors things. I also know that there are plenty of exceptions. L7 always rocked as hard as anyone.

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