As it turns out, when you approach it with sufficiently low expectations, the Breeders‘ long-delayed comeback release, Title TK, is a damn good listen.

Faint praise indeed, but those are the circumstances under which I arrived at listening to it (over and over) lately. Reviews anywhere worth reading ranged from the lukewarm to the angry, and you do have to wonder about a band revitalized by the addition of guys whose claim to fame is the willingness to back up an aging, toothless Lee Ving in a latter-day version of Fear.

Title TK naturally will let down some folks who are invested in the Breeders’ earlier work, especially after the long break between releases. A wearier, weatherbeaten Kim Deal leads this iteration of the band, and the smile has left her face. You can’t believe everything you read, but it’s easy to buy all the reports on her beery lifestyle if we can judge from the torn and frayed sounds inside. Even worse, sister Kelley seems to have leveraged herself out of much more than occasional vocal duties, being too busy getting off and on and off junk.

In a minor surprise, the record at hand sounds superficially Pixies-influenced. It seems at times like a descendant to Surfer Rosa, only too depressed to crack jokes. There are the dry, surgically separated mixes and lean, minimal arrangements you expect in any Steve Albini, er, production (the Rosa connection), but while the guitar tones are suitably growly, they are blunted, no treble and all mid-tone. The rhythm section get their proper prominent placement, but the feel of the beats they boom out is indeed “fragmented” and “deconstructed,” as has been reported elsewhere. With the possible exception of the two-stepping “Full On Idle” and headfirst finale “Huffer,” the darkness exceeds the fun factor throughout.
The material itself, described by some as underwritten, actually sounds loose, organic and stream-of-consciousness, belying the hard labor that no doubt went into their creation. Deal applies her withered whispers and hazy sneers to lyrics that render wasted afternoons doing wip-its, aimless journeys and unfulfilling trysts in first-person cubist verse. Basically, she found the divine hammer she was looking for, and when he never returned after stepping out for a pack of cigarettes, she wrote the whole thing off because he wasn’t such a great lay to begin with.

TK isn’t the killer summer record I’ve been looking for these past few months, but since the summer love thing hasn’t materialized either, it’s the next best thing — a soundtrack to bad times and disappointment to tap along to on the steering wheel. And “Off You,” the drumless, lilting curiosity that pops up at track three, is odds-on favorite to remain my favorite ballad this year.

Put another way, if you haven’t been through a lot — peaks and downturns — since “Cannonball” splashed onto MTV in 1993, or even since the Amps cranked up in ‘95, then maybe you have more to worry about than being bummed out because the new Breeders record isn’t all you hoped for.

Links:
http://www.noaloha.com/breeders/