The Breeders: Last Splash : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

It was with the late and much lamented ultra-indie Blake Babies that Juliana Hatfield began becoming an alternative dream heroine -- beautiful, bold, disaffected. On her second solo outing, "Become What You Are," she demonstrates that she has got the goods for good. Her unapologetically -- even indulgently -- girlish vocals in honeyed contrast to her bitter, fuzz-toned guitar, she pens fractured pop songs whose content would be heaven for caseworkers on the sensitive-youth beat -- identity crisis, family conflict, fantasy about rock stars, grief for dead birds.

With titles like "A Dame With a Rod," "Supermodel" and "Spin the Bottle," Hatfield's music is never less than fun, and sometimes it's significantly more. It's the lurking sadness around its edges, though, that makes it stick and sting.

From much further out of far-left field comes "Last Splash" by the Breeders, headed by ex-Pixie Kim Deal (and including her twin sister, Kelley). Punk guitar executed with a rare invention undergirds their remarkable and remarkably strange songs -- strange because they sound at first just like great garage rock but then twist off in all kinds of intriguing, unpredictable directions.

The "meaning" of songs like "No Aloha," "Mad Lucas" and "Cannonball" is very m