Breeders
Fillmore, Silver Spring, Maryland, September 21, 2023
I might be one of the only 1990s alternative listeners who never had a CD or cassette copy of
Last Splash on my shelves. So it’s somewhat a surprise I ended up seeing the
Breeders on their reunion show spotlighting that album and its lasting impact in popular music and popular culture decades later.
1990s female-fronted alternative rock is having a real resurgence. In addition to reunion tours (Velocity Girl! Tuscadero!) there are host of young musicians, most of them women or non-binary, who are pulling clearly from the same threads that animated Kim Deal and her bandmates in the 1990s.
Most notably, of course, chart-topping pop star Olivia Rodrigo has released an album that’s basically a throwback to the formulas that Deal was helping to mastermind back in that era in the Pixies and Breeders — loud/soft dynamics, pretty whispered melodies over abrasive guitars, confrontational lyrics that just as frequently turn their daggers on the singer as the nominal target of the song. It’s kinda emo, it’s very poppy, but it would have been a chart-topping modern rock hit in the middle 1990s. (If you read the
spectacular Caryn Ganz profile of Rodrigo, she mentions Rodrigo going to a Tori Amos concert with Annie Clark of St. Vincent, which is some kind of circular Venn diagram of multiple generations of provocative female singer-songwriting.) Of course Olivia Rodrigo’s most obvious ancestral forebear is Paramore, which spins some of the 90s rock templates in a direction of more shoutable choruses and catharsis in lieu of unresolved tension.
Anyway, back to the Breeders. (Rodrigo, not coincidentally, has the Breeders scheduled to open some of the shows on her upcoming tour — which is guaranteed to thrill the parents of today’s teenagers who are being persuaded to bankroll tickets.)
Last Splash is one of those weird artifacts of its era: honest-to-God Top 40 pop hits interspersed with abrasive noise, a power-pop jam, and an only-semi-joking country road song.
I would not have budgeted to see the reunion, but a lot of my friends were already planning to go, and then one friend ended up in a bicycle accident with a ticket he wasn't able to use. So I dashed out to Silver Spring on the Red Line, just in time to completely miss the opening act,
Screaming Females. (I heard from friends that they shredded.) But the Fillmore was packed; I wasn’t able to get a spot on the floor so I watched from the balcony. The place was jammed, and it wasn’t just aging Gen Xers; there were teenaged girls who were
into that shit — twelve- or fourteen-year-old girls singing along to everything. Do we credit Rodrigo for this, too?
Unlike some reunion gigs I’ve seen, the Breeders were clearly having fun on the 30th anniversary of
Last Splash, accompanied by a new remastered edition of the album. If you saw the
excellent three page spread on the Breeders in the Washington Post last week, it serves as a reminder of the strife and turmoil that the Breeders faced in the 1990s and 2000s, but at the Fillmore Kim Deal was joking the whole time, and clearly enjoying herself, goofing with her sister Kelley and guitarist and drummers. Clearly it isn’t a joyless cash-grab like her experience in the Pixies. One of the funniest bits is her switching microphones to do the submarine “a — ooh — gah” submerging sound effects and then blowing a referee’s whistle before spitting it aside in the opening to “Cannonball.” Speaking of which, doing “Cannonball” as the second song in the set is commitment to the album structure that you have to respect in a singles-driven era. (Concert etiquette data point, comparing one night’s concert going to the next: Boomers take out their cellphones to film Peter Gabriel doing "Sledgehammer" way more than Gen Xers take out their phones to film the Breeders doing "Cannonball.”) Deal even poked gentle fun at the idea of taking a break in the middle of the
Last Splash set to turn the record over (“Flipside”) for the young folks in the audience for whom records are more like a tangible fetish object than a medium to carry sound.
Even though I don’t listen to the Breeders on anything like a regular basis, I was impressed how much I enjoyed the set. It was the antithesis of an overly-scripted, cash-grab reunion show. The band members were amusing one another and didn’t take themselves too seriously. And all the songs have serious hooks, from the gnarly “Saints” to the frantic jangle and sweetly sung harmonies of “Divine Hammer.” Their cover of Ed’s Redeeming Qualities’ “Drivin’ On 9” featured a sweet violin solo in the conclusion and gentle swaying and hand-holding amidst the audience members.
Following the conclusion of the 14-song (including “Roi (Reprise)”) set from
Last Splash, the band did a hodgepodge of selections from
Pod, including an excellent “When I Was a Painter,” and
All Nerve, including “Walking With a Killer,” which is oddly the only Breeders songs on my iPhone. And it was over. Concise, catchy, not overstaying its welcome; around 90 minutes, really the perfect length for a headlining set from a band that doesn’t have the deepest of catalogues. Everyone was happy.
Full setlist here:
https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-breeders/2023/the-fillmore-silver-spring-silver-spring-md-23a3b8f3.html
Closing thought: What if — hear me out — Olivia Rodrigo covered “Divine Hammer” for the next Marvel
Thor soundtrack? Imagine the cross-marketing opportunities.
