The Breeders Cup Overflows

The Breeders played at a packed, swampy Neumos last night; the air was heavy and humid from the approaching rainstorm, and by the time they came on, at 11:30 p.m., we were a coupla-few beers into the evening and our eyelids were a little droopy.

That changed quickly.

We've been living under a rock the last few years, so we had no idea the Deal sisters had put out a new album, Mountain Battles--we just fondly remembered Last Splash and how vividly "Cannonball" still summons up the summer of '93. (Espresso shakes at the B&O figure prominently.) And while "Divine Hammer" came early on in the 90-minute set, and "Cannonball" a little over halfway, the mood was not backward-looking to glory days. This band is tight, goofy, deadpan; the new songs uptempo, poignant, experimental, Spanish (okay, just "Regalame Esta Noche"), pogo-inducing. Kelley worried about her voice, prompting Kim to tell her that she was "pitchy, dawg."

The people who usually move to the center of the floor to have a long, loud, drunken conversation over the music had gone somewhere else. This was a Breeders revival meeting, for true believers and new conversions. Ecstatic yelps greeted the opening chords. The band mopped their faces with towels and played on. There was an overwhelming sense of having come through, though life was not exactly easier for it. "My mom's losing her mind," said Kim, referring to her mom's actual dementia, and explaining that even so, the title of the haunting, elegiac ballad "Here No More" was her mom's idea. Kelley's voice has a timbre that in harmony with Kim's creates a third, bright, child's soprano that appears like an hallucination in a song about the dead who are gone. Time flew by. One song bled into another, almost more than in metaphor.

A drunken Scotsman cried out from the center of the crowd, "Play a song for Scotland!" We had thought the whole concert was for Scotland.