The trouble with Kim Deal being in the Pixies is that it took that much longer for people to realise how vital the Breeders were. At first, Pod can sound slight: The songs fragment more than they cohere, and the recording feels strangely misaligned, like a snapshot where the subject is blurry or set off to the side. Guitarist Tanya Donnelly, who’d met Deal while the Pixies were on tour with Throwing Muses, said the band recorded most of it in their pyjamas, and it shows.
But as the gaps accrue, you realise how deliberate the music is. Compared to the band’s peers on the cult British label 4AD, the Breeders sounded scrappy, unsophisticated and distinctly American, steeped in classic rock (“Hellbound”), girl-group sweetness (“Doe,” “Only in 3’s”) and the kind of folksy simplicity (“Fortunately Gone”) that art-rock had by then spent nearly 20 years trying to counteract.
But the album’s best songs (“Doe”, “Iris”, “Oh!”) combine that simplicity with a kind of absent-minded mysteriousness that draws you down the carpeted hallways of suburban houses and into their darkened cul-de-sacs, mixing innocence and sex in ways that bypasses the conscious mind. As a teenager growing up in Dayton, Ohio, Kim Deal had been a star cheerleader and honours student who, by her own admission, spent her downtime with local burn-outs experimenting with hard drugs. On Pod, you hear both.
The album opened up space for a wave of female-centric indie-rock bands that handled feminism not as an overt trait but an embedded one—they were women, and distinctly, but with a sense of ease and irony that made their implicit politics easy to embrace. It also showed that there were still ways to twist somewhat conventional rock music into new shapes with new poetic resonances. (Kurt Cobain was an avowed fan.) But most of all, Pod paved the way for Kim Deal’s strange, charming world-view, leading to a body of music that has comparisons but no real peers. When the Pixies reformed about 20 years later, the band’s lead singer Black Francis joked that all Kim had to do to get the crowd screaming was say hi. On Pod, you find out why.
Tracklisting
- Glorious
- Doe
- Happiness Is A Warm Gun
- Oh!
- Hellbound
- When I Was A Painter
- Fortunately Gone
- Iris
- Opened
- Only In 3’s
- Lime House
- Metal Man
Apple Music
Videos
Glorious
More Videos
- Doe
- Happiness Is A Warm Gun
- Oh
- Hellbound
- When I Was A Painter
- Fortunately Gone
- Iris
- Opened
- Only In 3s
- Lime House
- Metal Man
Release Images
Release Information
| Key | Value |
|---|---|
| Wikipedia URL | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pod_(The_Breeders_album) |
| Format | Vinyl LP Album Reissue |
| Label | 4AD |
| Catalog Number | CAD 0006 |
| Notes | Includes a printed inner sleeve. Track positions are sequentially listed as 1 to 12 across sides. Recorded at Palladium Studios, Edinburgh, Scotland. Thanks to Carl Haarer, Mickey Bones, David Narcizo and Gary Smith, Paul Kolderie, Joe Harvard at Ford Apache. Made in the EU Josephine Wiggs courtesy of [l2051]. EMI Music Publishing Ltd. except A3 Sony / ATV Music Publishing (UK) Ltd. ℗ & © 1990 4AD Ltd. |
| Discogs URL | The Breeders - Pod |