It's generally bad critical form to reference the record company-supplied bio in a review, but the one-pager accompanying the Breeders' Mountain Battles is worth mentioning: It's written by Josephine Wiggs, who played bass on the band's first two albums but left in the late 1990s while the Breeders withered in a seemingly interminable state of inertia. That Wiggs has resurfaced after a decade to play the role of Breeders cheerleader speaks volumes about the kind of faith and goodwill Kim and Kelley Deal have accrued over the years, despite a career that's nearly derailed on more than a few occasions due to the sisters' well-documented substance abuse and the group's peculiar recording habits and revolving-door rhythm sections. After hearing Mountain Battles, Wiggs admits her reaction was: "Why aren't I playing on this album?" Her excitement is genuine-- Mountain Battles is indeed the best Breeders album since 1993's Last Splash.
Which, of course, isn't saying a helluva lot, given that the 15 years in between have produced but one official record: 2002's Title TK, whose nine-years-in-the-waiting build-up was far too great a weight for its brittle, often sluggish low-fi pop oddities to withstand. In lieu of a return-to-form, we simply had to be content with the fact that the Breeders had returned at all. However, in contrast to all the uncertainty that hung over the band pre-Title TK, the Breeders approached Mountain Battles from a position of relative stability, with bassist Mando Lopez, drummer Jose Medeles, and producer Steve Albini all returning for another go; the six-year gap between that album and Mountain Battles is easily accounted for by Kim's entry into rehab in 2002 and the subsequent Pixies reunion tours that kept her on the road for the better part of 2004-05. But true to the Breeders tradition of tellingly apropos album titles (the hermetically sealed claustrophobia of 1990's Pod, the breakthrough/burn-out of Last Splash, the work-in-progress feel of Title TK), Mountain Battles suggests that all those Pixies paychecks don't make the Breeders' business any easier. If Title TK was a tentative first step back into the public eye, Mountain Battles finds Kim and Kelley proudly venerating the Breeders' battle-scarred history and bull-headed perseverance.
Like Last Splash's "New Year", Mountain Battles' "Overglazed" is more intro than proper opener: Over an ascendant surge of swirling backward-looped guitars and crashing drums, Kim repeats the song's lone lyric-- "I can...I can feel it!"-- like someone who's just woken from a coma. Or, in her case, it's someone who's reconnected with a muse that only seems to appear every half-decade or so, which would explain her tendency to linger on a feeling: "Night of Joy" plays up the contrast between its sweet, girl-group melody and the song's hauntingly absent ambience (much like Kim's star cameo on Sonic Youth's 1995 creeper "Little Trouble Girl"); the optimistic rebirth narrative of "We're Going to Rise" playfully jibes with the song's lethargic waltz rhythm, as if slowing down the action lets her better savor the moment of peace.
With such deliberately spare presentation, Mountain Battles takes some time to warm up to (and new-wave toss-offs like "Bang On" still carry traces of Title TK's song-sketch incompletion), but then Kim and Kelley Deal's pretty sing-song harmonies and affable Ohio charm can distract us from how difficult the Breeders' music can be-- both for them as players and us as listeners. By this point, that very sense of struggle is intrinsic to the Breeders sound: It's pretty amazing that after all those years of line-up changes and aborted recording sessions, the Breeders pretty much sound exactly the same as they ever did, the quirks, hiccups, and sputters once attributed to a certain amateurish enthusiasm sounding ever more like purposeful components of their bubblegum bricolage. (See: the basement-Zeppelin chug of "No Way".)
No, there isn't a "Cannonball" here, but the buoyant, bass-driven strutter "Walk It Off" makes for a dandy companion piece to Pod's "Only in 3's"; Kelley's power-pop pick-me-up "It's the Love" gleams with a "Divine Hammer" shimmer; and the sisters' voices have never sounded finer than on the country-harmony duet "Here No More". But Mountain Battles' air of revitalization-- the thing that has Wiggs wishing she had her old job back-- is characterized not just by these straight pop shooters, but the apparent glee with which the Deals toss out the curveballs: the Teutonic-tongued oompa-loompa punk of "German Studies", the Spanish-sung slow dance "Regalame Esta Noche" and the bizarro rumble-in-the-jungle group chant of "Istanbul". Once upon a time, bands used to model their careers on copping the Breeders' moves (see: Salt, Veruca). Mountain Battles' greatest success is it makes that very idea seem once again like both an admirable ideal, and an unachievable one.
