The Breeders - Last Splash

A heart!

He does that with all his cds!!!!

Seriously.

You in your twentys then?

Of course. How old did you think someone as immature as I was?

What bands are crud??

Anyway, Aja - think of anything played on Top 40.

Ok.

Makes sense.

Yeah. He doesn't listen to that.

Breeders rule.

B-b-but, how do *you* remember it, smart guy? It's not a grabte album, but 'Cannonball' is triff, and ayway Albini can eat a bag of fuc.

I would have thought through listening to Meatloaf with your dad you'd have a much greater handle on the use of (brackets) from his song titles.

Yours pedantically...

Also, that's one of my favorite cover images ever. I don't think I'd like the album quite so much without it.

geezz this album is ridiculous. Pod is still my favorite, but the lushness of this in contrast is so beautiful. Lush with just enough guts.

New Year, Roi and Mad Lucas only get better with age

I wholly concur with the NME's assessment (from back in the day): "After a few beers, the Breeders are the best band in the world".

ha

every fucking song on this is monstrous.

EVERY FUCKING SONG

saints

almost kind of redundant to see a Surmounter post on an old thread full of Aja posts.

wait what does that mean?

Yeah, shit hot album. I'd rank it equal with Surfer Rosa and Doolittle.

ugh, why is everything she does SO GOOD

that fucking bitch

Why is she a bitch then? Or is it a rhetorical kind of bitch?

it's an i'm jealous kind of bitch =)

She sure does have an ear for a tune.

I love this album, but
I don't get the love for Pod; I think it's the same thing as I like Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde and don't really care about Surfer Rosa or Doolittle.

i know, her melody making is unparalleled, in my humble opinion.

what?? Pod is SO SO SO SO SO SO SO different from Trompe Le Monde?

Pod = minimalist. dirty guitars. badass drumming. great hooks. IRIS

I know. I like Trompe Le Monde and Last Splash and DO NOT Like Pod, Doolittle and Surfer Rosa.

ooooh. well

Love this album. "Drivin' on 9" always struck me as a pretty clever album plot twist.

yes! and even tho it's like the "parent track" (my mom always loved when this came on), it's still just great.

I heard "Drivin' on 9" in a bar not long ago, and was somewhat surprised to find that Kim's voice sounded kind of affectedly girlish in a slightly annoying way. Surprising, because I used to really like her voice.

Without playing favorites, Pod totally pushes different buttons than Last Splash does.

tis true, they compliment each other well i feel

The "Driving on 9" cover reminds me -- I don't think there's any current equivalent to bands like that, is there? Ed's Redeeming Qualities, bits of the Donner Party, etc.: there seemed to be this 80s thing of (usually older) musicians in cities doing weirdo pop like this, and it feels like the Big Business of indie these days -- the way you can't just aim to be local oddballs anymore -- has made that vanish.

The acts I'm thinking always seemed to be made up of people working on their third or fourth graduate degrees.

man Ed's Redeeming Qualities were so great

yea i know what u mean nabisco. i love those sorts of covers....

i never checked out Ed's Redeeming Qualities. Who sang/was on guitar?

some fat bald guy

awOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo

tuh ruh tuh ruh tuh tuh— tuh tuh, tuh

I started a Genius account because I thought the "Bragging Party" lyrics should be on there, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Anyone wanna handle it?

https://www.stereogum.com/2228391/the-breeders-share-previously-unreleased-go-man-go-from-last-splash-30th-anniversary-reissue/music/

30th anniversary version coming out, remastered from tapes previously thought lost (prior box version was not remastered). They found a couple of lost songs from the sessions: "Go Man Go" which has a video and can be found on youtube (and is a Frank Black collaboration?) and "Divine Mascis," a version of "Divine Hammer" with J on vocals.

Crazy how even master tapes for name bands from the '90s can still be lost. It's not like the '60s when there were poor archival practices and people were still using card catalogs. IIRC the Pixies couldn't find the masters for Bossanova for years until someone finally uncovered them around 2007 or 2008 - I think it was in Elektra's vault, but poorly archived so not easily found or readily accessible.

Somebody on the Hoffman forums said that Kim is set to release her solo album soon. I wonder if it's all new songs, or a compilation of the 7"s that she put out a few years ago.

Crazy how even master tapes for name bands from the '90s can still be lost. It's not like the '60s when there were poor archival practices and people were still using card catalogs

I guess it's that decent storage can still cost $$$ and people in bands can be notoriously flakey and not always operating in their own best interests (and not always in possession of their own master tapes) (and not always aware of the value of those things).

Very interesting that Deal would sign off on a Frank Black co-write. Maybe an olive branch of some kind?

It is a shame that this record has gotten so many reissues while the superior POD hasn’t

Somebody on the Hoffman forums said that Kim is set to release her solo album soon. I wonder if it's all new songs, or a compilation of the 7"s that she put out a few years ago.

― Cow_Art, Tuesday, June 27, 2023 12:03 PM (thirty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Either way, BRING IT

I assume "Go Man Go" was something they fiddled with in the Pixies at some point? There are some Last Splash demos on the internet and "Go Man Go" is on that, so it's been around a little while but nobody knew there was a finished version.

The Pod demos are really good, I wish they had a legit release.

Very interesting that Deal would sign off on a Frank Black co-write. Maybe an olive branch of some kind?

Is there actual emnity between Kim and Frank? Whenever I've interviewed her as a Breeder she's denied any real conflict between them.

Frank was grumpy about people liking Kim and how the Breeders had an "easy" time of it. He apparently griped about how the Breeders got more to record Pod than the Pixies did for Doolittle. Over time he got more bitter and he started cutting back on how much Kim could sing.

I've never read an interview where Kim had anything bad to say about the Pixies. At worst she has said something along the lines of it being a bassist in somebody else's band, but I think that it was initially more collaborative.

This is from Fool The World, a Pixies oral history by Josh Frank and Caryn Ganz.

The touring cycle for Doolittle was fraught with tension. Black Francis allegedly threw a guitar at Deal during a concert in Germany. The next day she refused to play at the band’s next show in Frankfurt and was almost fired from the Pixies.

Black Francis claimed to Spin magazine that he did, in fact, kick the guitar at her because Kim showed up an hour late to a sold-out gig. Regardless, the pair soon stopped talking all together and traveled separately from each other on the road.

the superior POD

nah

there was a time when i thought of Last Splash as one of my favorite albums and i gradually came to realize that most of what i fund essential in the whole album is located in the intro to Cannonball.

What I find essential about the Breeders is not their songs or their albums or their shows or their sound, but the way Kim Deal's approach to music and to life just seems to permeate all of it. I can't explain it any better than that, really.

and "Divine Mascis," a version of "Divine Hammer" with J on vocals.

Too bad, when I first saw this one I was hoping for a 6-minute version of "Divine Hammer" with J ripping a totally gnarly solo for the back half.

What I find essential about the Breeders is not their songs or their albums or their shows or their sound, but the way Kim Deal's approach to music and to life just seems to permeate all of it. I can't explain it any better than that, really.

Yes. I hear it as a uniquely enlightened perma-stoned quality, minus any negative aspects that might entail. Her deep commitment to "all-wave" fidelity is a big part of the appeal too.

Last Splash -> Pacer -> Title TK is the holy trinity for me, but every Deal record is a treasure.

Title TK is all-time.

I get there were tensions before the initial split, btw, but the vibe I got was that she had no real issue with the reunited Pixies, and just was over doing it. She also pushed back VERY strongly at the suggestion that she was creatively frustrated in the Pixies,

As the Pixies went on to college-rock stardom and underground acclaim, and Kim began to assume her cool status, Kelley moved to California, working for the defence contractor Dynamics Research Corporation. "Being in the Pixies might have been fun, but I think everything worked out for the best," she smiles. "I didn't really want to be in Charles's band, I wanted to be in Kim's band. I loved her songs, and wanted to play them."

"I wish Kim was allowed to write more songs for the Pixies," commented Kurt Cobain in 1992, "because Gigantic is their best song, and Kim wrote it." The seductive Gigantic, on which she also sang lead vocals, featured on Pixies' debut full-length, 1988's Surfer Rosa, but would be her sole songwriting contribution to the group. She denies feeling frustrated by Thompson's creative domination of the group, however.

"I remember during a Pixies tour in the 1980s, some record company guy from the midwest saying, 'Kim, you just need more confidence,'" she sighs. "Because, to him, I was the Maiden in Distress, and Charles was The Man Who Was Keeping Me Down, not letting me sing. But I didn't want to sing in the Pixies; I'd written hundreds of songs before joining the group, I was interested in being the bassist now. As if I ever needed permission to sing my songs ..."

Nothing on Last Splash can match the quality of “Iris” or “Lime House” (a STUNNING song), and I like Last Splash quite a bit

I used to think the pixies would have been the coolest indie band ever if they also did breeders stuff and kelley had joined but it would have been a coolness upgrade for frank and the others way more than for the deals and obviously they see it very differently and I'm glad it didn't happen. I certainly bought into the same mythology as kurt until just now

invisible man, divine hammer, do you love me now beg to differ but I always preferred nevermind to bleach as well

xp

i appreciated that the “pod is better” discourse drove me to pod, but last splash is the phantasmagoric punk record of my dreams, sounds just as beautiful and fierce and fucked up to me today as it did when i was sixteen. even the instrumentals are like from some upside down universe where surf rock is the coolest music of all time still

favorite breeders record is actually all nerve tho

_and "Divine Mascis," a version of "Divine Hammer" with J on vocals._


Too bad, when I first saw this one I was hoping for a 6-minute version of "Divine Hammer" with J ripping a totally gnarly solo for the back half.

Pod is probably last if I had to rank Breeders albums, but really really love Pod. I just like the others more. There's a tightness to the songs and that's not what I'm looking for in my Kim Deal jams.

even the instrumentals are like from some upside down universe where surf rock is the coolest music of all time still

yes

my main objection to the reissues is they fucked with one of the most descriptive album covers of all time.

All this talk has me returning to one of my top five Breeders tunes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p1BmtN5hCw

Sorry, top ten KIM DEAL songs

So everybody already knows that Kelley Deal is currently in Protomartyr as a touring member, right? They were sublime here in Philadelphia at Johnny Brenda’s this month!

I’ve seen Kelley play with Protomartyr a couple of times now, and I absolutely am loving the new Protomartyr rekkid, but can’t help but wonder, other than the one EP, why she hasn’t been a studio member of the band, too.

Just got tix to see them and Belly! Pod destroys all their other albums imho, although their greatest hits will be incredible once it finally comes out.

Suburban dc show is billed as just them for like $60 and I might skip. Pre-sale today

We got tix last night to see them + Belly in October.

Only shows within driving distance are either supporting Foo Fighters (no) or ACL (also no)

love Pod and Last Splash equally but hard to describe the different ways they make me feel. maybe like Pod is inviting you to come and look at this weird sunset before it disappears, while Last Splash is: let's climb inside the sun and feel all its different kinds of burny.

i like the sugar they added to last splash to trick you into thinking it's not that weird at first, pod is just creepy and insular in a way that i admire but don't always enjoy

Crazy how even master tapes for name bands from the '90s can still be lost. It's not like the '60s when there were poor archival practices and people were still using card catalogs

or like the 2020s when there are poor archival practices and not even any card catalogs

please see recent news article about a freezer at a university containing $20 million worth of research samples being unplugged by a janitor

"Go Man Go" (the unreleased Black Francis co-write) is really good! Cool 3/4 rhythm and an interesting melody. Easily could have made the album.

https://thebreeders.bandcamp.com/track/go-man-go

I think the credit to Black Francis is because it borrows heavily from a Pixies song! Which one, I can not name now but it definitely "contains elements" or however the IP is defined/categorized these days.

Kind of sounds like a cross between "Caribou" and "Velouria" as far as Pixies songs go.

Happy 30th!

Kind of sounds like a cross between "Caribou" and "Velouria" as far as Pixies songs go.

― J. Sam, Sunday, July 23, 2023 4:09 PM (one month ago)

Yeah, the "goodbye baby" part is heavily indebted to the "V E L O U~/R I A" part of Velouria.

About that "Divine Mascis", I was bummed to see that we actually were close to my dream J solo on it:

“At the time, J Mascis was a guitar god… we sent him the tape to put guitar on, so when it came back and he’s got rid of our voices and just put his vocal on, we were like, ‘Wha?!’ But it’s really cute,” Kelley Deal told Uncut. “There’s a freshness to it, and it’s just so weird. I like his voice and the idiosyncratic way he sings and delivers lines. So I thought it was really neat.”

also I love Kelley but I take strong exception to her "was" in reference to J's guitar god status

Intrigued