The Breeders: Title TK : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The Breeders were the indie band that was going to save music after the implosion of grunge, but they couldn't even keep themselves minimally healthy. In the mid-Nineties, Kim Deal's post-Pixies group collapsed under the combined stress of her purported studio obsessiveness and her twin sister Kelley's dependencies.

The Deal sisters -- aided by members of the venerable Los Angeles punk band Fear -- had to fight their way out of a lot to make Title TK (publishing-speak for "name to come"), and you can hear it. This is hot, scratchy, burdened un-rock, and one horribly sad album. The drums in "Sinister Fox" could be knocking to get in, or aping gunshots, or maybe it's just Kim hitting her head against the wall again. Despite the frequent jokes in the lyrics, Title TK is almost painfully intimate. Kim's girlish (or is it boyish?) voice grinds sweetly, weariedly, sloppily inside your brain: "Better I, better I stayed up," she repeats throughout "Put on a Side," while a single bass-guitar note thrums and bends. The songs break themselves apart and regroup uncomfortably. A spare grunge call-and-response leads "Little Fury" into a chugging Martian approximation of a rock song; the light pop verses of "Forced to Drive" dim under the gloom of a twisty, malignant chorus. "Off You" is as direct and heartbreaking as an eighty-five-year-old blues recording, and Kim, her voice clear and full of hope, can't help sounding like a young woman who's lived ten awful lifetimes. Title TK is absolutely beautiful, but only a fiend would find it merely so.

ARION BERGER
(RS 896 - May 23, 2002)