It's my pleasure to kick off a Breeders review without feeling the need to hypothesize as to what the hell took 'em so long. I mean, this time, we know: In the year or so since the fitfully rewarding Mountain Battles, the Breeders have toured some, severed ties with 4AD, and-- in London, Chicago, and Dayton-- laid down the tracks that became their self-released Fate to Fatal EP. And, while you'd be hard up to find anybody who'd ever met "Roi" who'll tell you the Breeders hit any kind of artistic peak in this decade, by all accounts, the long periods of infighting and inebriation and, worst of all, inactivity that characterize far too much of their career appear behind 'em.
Shucks, the baddest twins in rock have even been biding their time down at the Dick Blick, and the hand-screened covers of the limited vinyl edish of Fate to Fatal will have been touched by at least one Deal, maybe both. As far as the return of the physical record as fetish object, well, you're not gonna do a lot better than that. As far as the record itself, though, Fate to Fatal's just a little lucky it's got all that other stuff working for it. For a four-song affair, there's a lot to talk about before we get into how this music sounds: The packaging, yes, but Screaming Tree/Gutter Twin/hellspawn Mark Lanegan sings one of the tunes, and another's a cover of a Bob Marley cut. When I'm sliding the record out of its delightfully wonky cardboard sleeve, I am one happy sonofagun; I mean, I'm not immune to the charms of a quirky object made just for me and 999 other lucky sods by a band I've cared about for a good decade and a half. Once the needle hits Fate to Fatal, though, my mood swings.
Like every other Breeders record before it, Fate to Fatal's opener kills-- though my colleague David Raposa feels otherwise. All brute force and giddy charm, the eponymous leadoff track is the Breeders at their most jarring and most exuberant, with churning power-chords beating out a kinda rhythm for the Deal gals to holler and shout over. But, oh, when they move from a scream to a whisper and back again, does it ever sound good. The Deals singing in tandem make one of the great noises in rock, and when you throw 'em all over a tune this kinetic, this heady, this pleasure-center-smacking, it just couldn't feel more right. Plus, I rather like my Breeders careening and stumbling and anti-produced.
Then there's the Lanegan-wheezed "The Last Time", on which the very special guest feels genuinely extraneous. It's a pretty nothing-song to begin with, little more than some strumming and a couple of ominous-sounding throwaway lines for the guy to growl and, sweet mercy, some much-needed atmospheric wooze around what I suppose you'd call the chorus. After the headrush of "Fate to Fatal", the staid, static "Last Time" is a total bringdown.
The Breeders have a history with unadorned, Everly Brothers-style harmony-heavy acoustic cuts (covers, often), and their Steve Albini-recorded take on Bob Marley's "Chances Are" doesn't stray from the formula much. It's plenty gorgeous, but it's a fairly slow acoustic version of another song, and it's terribly reminiscent of their equally fine take on Hank Williams' "I Can't Help It (If I'm Still In Love With You)" from the "Divine Hammer" single and their own "Here No More" from Mountain Battles. I could listen to them sing all day, and I'm awfully glad it's not "Buffalo Soldier", but it, like so many other attempts at Bob Marley tunes before it, doesn't linger.
Fate to Fatal touches down with the spindly "Pinnacle Hollow", which, you'll notice, sounds a good bit like a demo. It certainly feels straight from the four track, anyway, and that's good and bad by turns. The analog conception adds a lot of sonic interest to what doesn't otherwise seem like a fully formed idea-- a demo, you know-- but then again, so do a lot of the better Breeders records. That said, it's hard to hold against this one the fact that it merely sounds like the beginnings of a great Breeders track. Though it starts out fluttering, "Hollow" settles into an appealingly stoney crawl to it, and the slack, almost bluesy vocal achieves what I suspect Title TK's still-weird "Sinister Foxx" was shooting for. As it is, it's intoxicating, but I can't help but wonder what it'd sound like with a bridge. There's almost certainly something to be read into the resigned delivery on a line like "I don't know a sin I haven't found," or the fact that the tune's named for the West Virginny holler where the apparently ailing Mama Deal grew up, but like any Breeders song with a couple-three lyrics and a whole lot of fuzz, it's resistant to easy interpretation. To paraphrase the Deals' fellow rocker Lil Wayne, it feels big, and that's all that has to be said on the matter.
I kept coming back to Pitchfork's recent interview with the Deals while grappling with Fate to Fatal; even for a Breeders record and an EP still, it all just feels so casual, but from the song selection to the Lanegan-poaching down to the artwork, it sounds as if that was the idea all along. Casual is a fine look for the Breeders-- even if "The Last Time" is a little too casual-- and it's no bad thing to hear them having what sounds like a pretty good time goofing around. Plus, I'm plenty curious how bands big and small are figuring their ways around this batshit music economy we've got going, and for the Breeders-- well aware they're never going to sell a million copies of anything again-- this homespun limited-release coupled with readily available downloads and the possibility for more pressings seems as good a solution as any. Sure, I wish Fate to Fatal were a little more solid down the middle, but to hear Kim and Kelley tell it, it's meant to be an acrylic-slathered curio, odds and also sods, and as such, it's pretty wonderful. Wonderful, too, is that it's arrived so soon; had this been the first Breeders music hitting our ears in plural years, I doubt they'd get by with quite this much. Fact is, three new Breeders songs-- one great, one good, and one I've already forgotten-- and a not-half-bad cover is too nice a change of pace from a whole lotta nothing not to notice. And if nothing else, it'll have you wondering why they couldn't do this sort of thing more often.
