Oscillating feedback, heavy reverb, languid basslines, grunge guitar hooks, rocket-fire drum fills, and intoxicatingly sweet but deadly sharp vocal harmonies…it’s a killer combination. And that’s just one song.
With all of these too cool-to-care elements, it’s hard to imagine that the oddball indie gem ‘Cannonball’ – and the record from whence it came, The Breeders’ iconic Last Splash – was never expected to be a hit.
But the fact that The Breeders were so widely underestimated has only served to underscore the triumph of the group’s 1993 sophomore release
The album’s enduring success has been made that much sweeter through the reality of its emergence from initial obscurity. Last Splash is the classic underdog record.
It’s fair to say that no one expected much of the four-piece, the band that started out as Kim Deal’s side project – including Deal herself, who told Rolling Stone magazine that “We never thought anyone would hear us…There was no intention of getting on the radio, ever.”
Granted, Deal wasn’t exactly a stranger to the music scene – her bass player mantle for alt-rock trailblazers Pixies meant that she was never going to be considered an unknown.
But according to Deal, “Pixies fans didn’t know about The Breeders.” And when it came to solo output, the majority of Pixies fans could be forgiven for having their money riding on the group’s primary songwriter, frontman Black Francis.
“The Breeders waded out of the grunge rock comfort zone, past the standard soft-loud formula of their contemporaries, inventing a particular, peculiar pop grunge spectrum all of their own.”In the early 1990s, the shadow of the Pixies certainly loomed large over Deal’s fledgling side project.
Even by Gen X slacker standards, Kim Deal was always a woman who did things her own way. She reportedly joined Pixies after responding to an advert placed by Black Francis, seeking a female bass player who liked folk music minstrels Peter, Paul and Mary as well as the punk band Hüsker Dü.
Deal then turned up for the audition minus a bass guitar, as she had never played the instrument before.
She was obviously a quick learner; Pixies went on to secure critical and commercial acclaim with albums Surfer Rosa and Doolittle.
Despite their success, however, the rot soon set in between Francis and Deal.
Pixies lead guitarist Joey Santiago later explained of the growing tensions that the tough cookie bass player was “headstrong and wanted to include her own songs, to explore her own world”.
This was classic Deal – laissez faire, self-deprecating, the shoulder-shrugging approach of a laid back girl who swilled beer, didn’t wear makeup, and didn’t really seem to give a shit about what anyone else thought.
‘Saints’
‘Do You Love Me?’
Inevitably, the rancour bubbled over (Francis threw a guitar at Deal during a concert in Stuttgart). The group called time out, and The Breeders quickly became Deal’s primary recording outlet.
Deal initially formed The Breeders with friend and touring mate Tanya Donelly (Pixies toured Surfer Rosa in Europe with Donelly’s experimental alt-rock outfit Throwing Muses). Donelly, however, left the group shortly after the release of the 1992 EP Safari to focus on her group Belly.
Unthwarted by these early teething problems, Kim recruited her identical twin sister Kelly as lead guitarist (a case of history mimicking Kim’s Pixies audition, since Kelley had never played guitar).
But in typically forthright Deal fashion, Kim claimed in The Guardian that “I would rather listen to a bad player than someone who plays stock blues riffs with flair”.
Sound engineer with Cro-Magnon Studios, John Slough, echoed Kim’s sentiment t Spin, saying that “The parts that Kelley played, even if there was a mistake, it just made it a little punky.”
With British bassist Josephine Wiggs, and Kim’s friends Jim Macpherson on drums, the freshly cemented Breeders lineup knuckled down at Coast Recorders studio in San Francisco.
The group had already released debut album Pod in 1990, (which Kurt Cobain later cited as the number three record in his list of albums most influential to Nirvana’s sound), and opened for Nirvana on their 1992 tour – but still no one predicted the tidal wave that Last Splash was about to unleash.
Last Splash was released August 1993, dropped into an ocean of stiff competition – The Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream, Nirvana’s In Utero, and Pearl Jam’s Vs all appeared that same year.
But The Breeders waded out of the grunge rock comfort zone, past the standard soft-loud formula of their contemporaries, inventing a particular, peculiar pop grunge spectrum all of their own.
Last Splash takes its name from a “Cannonball” lyric, and the track has always marked the exhilarating apex of the group’s sprawling labyrinth of sound.
‘Cannonball’
‘SOS’
“Cannonball” was the album’s sonic boom, the hit that launched the album right out of the ball park.
A perfectly imperfect unexpected right hook, “Cannonball” still punches with Wiggs’ heavyweight bassline, the Deal twins’ raggedly beautiful harmonising, and that now immortal line “I’ll be your whatever you want/ the bong in this reggae song’.
This ‘reggae song’ also certified Kim Deal’s songwriting ability. A dirty, grungy anthem full of melodic pop moments, it’s possibly the only low-fi, aural-art project in history to also become a Top 40 hit.
In 2007, NME magazine ranked the hit at number 22 in its list of the 50 Greatest Indie Anthems Ever, confirming what most listeners had long known; that Black Francis wasn’t the only Pixie who could craft a seminal tune.
“Cannonball” may have been the most accessible moment on the album, but Last Splash bursts at the seams with a unique take on everything from surf rock (“Flipside”) to eerie, deconstructed metal (“Roi”), all while making their efforts sound completely uncontrived.
“S.O.S” starts off with a momentary unravelling of notes before morphing into a frenetic grab of instrumentation; the energised rock out was later sampled by English electronic music band The Prodigy in their 1996 hit single “Firestarter“.
The languorous twang and sweet sunset vocals of “No Aloha” are underscored by a dangerously chugging riff that pushes the track out of its comfortable tropical reverie.
The Breeders even do love songs, albeit with their trademark nonchalance. “Do you think of me/like I dream of you?” the sisters croon over a stomping drumbeat.
Rather than imploring, the chanted “come on/come on/come back to me right now” of the chorus is delivered with a raised eyebrow, an indifferent request with all of the urgency of the track’s trudging riffs.
“The reason I like The Breeders is for their songs, for the way they structure them, which is totally unique, very atmospheric. I wish Kim was allowed to write more songs for the Pixies, because ‘Gigantic’ is the best Pixies song, and Kim wrote it.” – Kurt CobainThere’s girlish charm of the country ballad “Drivin’ On 9”, the straight up power-chord rock of “Invisible Man”, and the sneering disdain and swaggering bass of “Hag”. Last Splash is a deviant grab-bag of genres, all tied together by The Breeders particular and exclusive brand of grunge.
Significantly, for a group that was ¾ female, The Breeders managed to shy away from the critics who tried to pigeonhole them with “riot grrrl” categorizations.
There was always a sly irony to The Breeders femininity. The band that went by the initial moniker “Boston Girl Super-Group” are also responsible for one of the most exuberant odes to male anatomy, the wistfully tongue-in-cheek “Divine Hammer”.
Yet the offhand nature of the album belied its painstaking production.
After Kim Deal decided that the drum sounds weren’t working out in the Coast studios, the band shifted part of the production to another studio in San Francisco’s Mission District, a notoriously gritty neighbourhood.
As if recording across two studios concurrently wasn’t taxing enough, the casually rumpled feel of the album was in fact carefully crafted.
Deal’s inventive approach to songwriting also saw her mic-ing up a sewing machine, and dropping cymbals out of a second storey window, in search of that sublimely fractured sound (“Since then, I’ve seen that you can buy cracked cymbals, so I’m not crazy” Deal recently told Uncut magazine).
Necessity is the mother of invention, and it was Kim Deal’s need to prove herself to the doubters that encouraged her to push all boundaries and she, more than most could attest that success is indeed the best revenge.
‘Divine Hammer’
‘Drivin’ On 9′
Post-Pixies, Black Francis’s solo self-inversion Frank Black, released in March 1993, enjoyed scanty commercial success.
Last Splash, meanwhile, peaked at #33 on Billboard‘s Top 200 album chart. Ten months after its release, the record was certified platinum, selling over one million copies.
Not bad for a girl who told Spin Magazine “When I got into music, I never thought anything I did would sell — ever”.
The best things are often the most fleeting, and true to form, the bottom fell out of The Breeders only a year after the release of Last Splash, when Kelley Deal’s heroin habit lead to her arrest for possession in 1994.
Kelley entered rehab in 1995, and the group went into a prolonged hibernation; it wasn’t until 2002 that they re-emerged with Title Tk, a solid enough album but one that could never compete with their 1993 opus.
But The Breeders had already long proven their worth.The enduring popularity of the Deal duo’s amaranthine record created a ripple effect that still resonates today.
In 2003, Last Splash came in at #64 on Pitchfork’s Top 100 Albums of the 1990s list. The album is also ranked #80 on Rolling Stone’s 100 Best Albums of the Nineties.
“Cannonball” has even infiltrated popular culture as the soundtrack to the stoner films South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut and Dude, Where’s My Car?.
Kurt Cobain famously said that “the main reason I like (The Breeders) is for their songs, for the way they structure them, which is totally unique, very atmospheric. I wish Kim was allowed to write more songs for the Pixies, because ‘Gigantic’ is the best Pixies song, and Kim wrote it’.
Last Splash was, and still is, is an avant-garde masterpiece, combining the Deal sisters’ independent spirit and aloof charisma with their willingness to throw themselves into an experimental maelstrom of surf rock guitar riffs, screeching feedback, fuzzed out melodies and buoyant vocals.
But it is the complete lack of pretention that makes the album so truly endearing.
The realness and rawness at the heart of each song on Last Splash speaks of a group motivated by nothing other than an honest love of sound. As Kelley Deal told Spin magazine, “If you’re present in what you’re doing, you don’t think about the impact it’s gonna have”.
It was, in the end, an impact that defied all expectation.
20 years ago, no one sounded quite like The Breeders, and 20 years on, no one has made a record that sounds quite like Last Splash.
