The floor is sticky, the aircon is a misnomer, and no one under 6ft can see much. Little has changed in this grungey north London venue, it seems, since the 90s.
Even before they play the quiet but skewering No Aloha, you can just about see from the acute angle of the three guitar necks that this is the Breeders, a leading outfit of the alt-rock era, in attack formation. They always held their instruments just that little bit high.
Women are strung across the stage – a bit like Haim, but with less concern for hairbrushes. The two Deal twins stand centre and left, with British bassist Josephine Wiggs in a beanie on the right; at the back is drummer Jim Macpherson.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of singing guitar hero Kim Deal – bassist in the Pixies, analogue noise nerd and independent rock auteur. Tonight, she is in charming form, eye-rolling about sobriety and ticking the sound man off about the quality of the reverb. This gig is a crash course in how Deal’s oddball fusions of surf guitar, Ramones-y bubblegum, vocal distortion (“awhoo-ooh!”) on a second microphone and heavy, avant-garde structures can sound fresh and deep this far along from source. Even better, her new songs are in the same class.
Just before coming on stage, Kelley Deal (the older identical twin by 11 minutes) receives a Gibson Les Paul guitar award from Q magazine – she holds it up with amused pride. Kelley could not play when she was drafted in as the Breeders’ guitarist, so the recognition is especially resonant (she also has her own band, R Ring).
For a while, the point of this show seems to be to throw out the most 90s sounds possible – like the forgettable, sludgy pop of Hag or the freeform, howling din of SOS, a racket the Prodigy sampled for Firestarter (Deal still collects royalties). This lineup made Last Splash, the Breeders’ hit 1993 album. The four put aside caring responsibilities (Kim looks after their mother, who has Alzheimer’s), carpentry (Macpherson), their own work (Wiggs) and some measure of calm to tour that album for its 20th anniversary, four years ago. To get there, they patched over hurts and gave up drinking (Kim and Kelley). But the eccentric, ticklish bass’n’drums opening to their classic Cannonball single was finally played authoritatively, and tonight they remain nimble and bouncy in glorious turn.
The torque of this returnee rhythm section shouldn’t be understated either. The Breeders always mixed perfectionist attention to songcraft and sound with lackadaisical – well, inebriated – performances, but tonight McPherson and Wiggs counterbalance the Deal guitars with guts.
Moreover, these Breeders are also playing the new songs that have recently trickled out of their bunker; they are signed to 4AD once again and the signs hint that more activity is afoot. Over the years, Deal has habitually put out music under one name or another. When Kelley was in rehab in 1995, Kim and McPherson recorded as the Amps, and lively renditions of that band’s Tipp City and Pacer (“now I like to get loud”) dot tonight’s set.
Kim made one Breeders album virtually singlehandedly – 2008’s Mountain Battles – represented tonight by the superb Bang On. The album before that, 2002’s Title TK, offers up the punky melodics of Huffer and the desolate guitar and vocal of Off You, one of Deal’s least-acknowledged high marks. The encore features Gigantic, which Kurt Cobain famously held to be the best Pixies song bar none. (Worth knowing: when bassist Paz Lenchantin replaced the last Kim Deal replacement in the reunited Pixies, she made Black Francis write Deal a candid thank-you song, All I Think About Now.)
In recent years, though, a slew of excellent 7” singles has come out under Kim’s own name, such as Are You Mine, a moving song about her mother’s Alzheimer’s. Some of these are now officially new Breeders songs, such as the stark yet poppy Walking With a Killer, delivered at strolling pace and with Deal’s customary mixture of sweetness, heft and space. Just in case the night was becoming too listenable, they cover Amon Düül II’s Archangels Thunderbird (it sounds faintly like Cannonball) alongside the more familiar Beatles’ song, Happiness Is a Warm Gun.
Most exciting of all, however, is new single Wait in the Car, a mighty, nagging, buzz-pop tune that rivals those of Deal’s heyday, and whose progress thumbs its nose at structure. Deal is known, superficially, for having the grunge era’s best pop ear. But her strange songs defy physics, holding together with no obvious screws or glues. You can only assume more wizardry is in the works.
