The Breeders - Mountain Battles

have been around for twenty years now, but with such massive gaps between each of their four albums, it’s all too easy for them to slip from your consciousness. Then again, that old saying about some things being worth waiting for is very true when it comes to this band. The Breeders are best known for their alternative anthem ‘Cannonball’ (from their 1993 album ‘Last Splash’) and still guaranteed to fill the floor at your local indie disco to this day. Heart of the band are sisters Kim and Kelley Deal, with Kim earning added cred for being bassist with on of Kurt Cobain’s favourite bands, the very wonderful Pixies.

Their last album was 2002’s ‘Title TK’, a spiky, surreal journey filled with killer hooks hidden under trippy beats, a million miles away from the quirky pop sensibilities which shot through ‘Last Splash’. ‘Mountain Battles’ sees the band wander even further down that kooky road, defiantly refusing to blast you with gigantic rock riffs they are quite obviously capable of producing in favour of something altogether tougher, grittier and stark.

As if you hadn’t guessed yet, ‘Mountain Battles’ is not easy to get the first or even the third time you hear it, but suddenly, almost imperceptibly, something clicks and it’s there, in your bloodstream, racing round your system at a hundred miles an hour. Maybe you fall for it with the extra chunky bass pouding through ‘Walk It Off’ - Mando Lopez’s bass practically leaps through your speakers and struts around your room like an escaped lion hungry for a fresh kill. Or perhaps with the campfire strumming and country-tinged harmonies of the cowboy waltz of ‘Here No More’. Maybe you’re finally hooked good and proper with the ultra retro fuzzy guitars and of ‘No Way’, or the scratchy sunstroke loopiness of ‘It’s The Love’. Whatever it is, something on ‘Mountain Battles’ will almost certainly grab you in the end and squeeze you within an inch of your life.

To have a band that absolutely refuses to compromise for even a second, and to hear a record made purely for the joy of the music rather than bending to the record company’s desires is still a thrill. The Breeders are infused with the indie spirit to their bones, and they can still knock you sideways with a gigantic rock wig out as much as the stripped down spectral, eerie nature of some of the tracks on ‘Mountain Battles’. Long may they continue, even if we do have to wait another five long years for the next instalment…