111. Cannonball

The Breeders: Last Splash (4AD, 1993);
composed by Kim Deal

By the early 1990s, “Indie” and “Alt” meant bupkes to me. A real war was when Journey or Eagles had been the enemy, but that was already way back then, back then. Rather, this was a time when thoughtful young people had gotten their heads around digital recording in a way the ‘70s holdovers never could, which unleashed a whole lot of possibilities for distorting aural scale. But whereas Soundgarden (for example) used the added definition to rev the guitar overtone saturation way up (a worthy goal), Kim Deal emerged from the disintegrating Pixies with her own counterintuitive synthesis. Instead of Jimmy Page’s analog trick of making Led Zeppelin’s human-scaled signifiers (voice and drums) as galactic as the electric ones, she did the reverse. You perceived the loud punky guitar bursts as just another logical part of a conversational grammar, abutting the unaccompanied light drum taps, acoustic chugs, and Kim and Kelley Deal’s just barely audible murmurs about splashes, bongs, and whateveryouwant. I was amused when journalists started asking Kim why the Pixies had never done any of her songs, after the Breeders outsold them. Because you need your own band to come up with something this perfect is why.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (or at least regularly) until Donald goes away.