I first saw Kim Deal in Iceland twenty years ago; the country, not the supermarket. In so writing I realise I am admitting, on record, to being over twenty years old, but these are the sacrifices one makes in the cause of Art. I was minding my own business flaneuring around capital city when I saw a sign about pixies. Now, if you find yourself, in the magical land of ice, offered a chance to see pixies, you grab it, even if it means catching a local strætó to a sports arena in Hafnarfjörður. IMAGINE MY SURPRISE, dear reader, to find on arrival no mere Europe-stalking hobgoblins but the actual band Pixies, live on stage, kicking off a reunion tour after a decade of diversions, featuring the eternally, insouciantly cool Kim Deal on the electric bass guitar. I recall an exuberant reception for her lead vocal on ‘Gigantic’, famously one of only a handful of co-writes and possibly the most crowd-pleasing singalong in the repertoire.
After ten years of replaying the back catalogue, she left Pixies for good to focus on side-turned-main hustle The Breeders, reforming their best-known line-up to play and record again. I saw Kim for a second time (I feel like we’re on first name terms at this point) seven years ago when the latter group played their new single to a full house in Camden. In the meantime, though, in a kind of back-to-basics declaration of independence, and a prefiguration of new record ‘Nobody Loves You More’, she’d recorded and self-released an album’s-worth of solo material on a series of 7” singles – of which the tracks from only one make it onto this new release, a further decade later: ‘Are You Mine?’ – a moving pedal-steeled lullaby inspired by caring for her dementia-afflicted mum – and ‘Wish I Was’, an instrumental-turned-song that, like the rest of this LP, may or may not be elliptically autobiographical.
I won’t say much more about the backstory because attempting to explain this record by its pedigree misses the point. Uniquely admired and respected on planet indie as she is, be assured that you could know and care nothing for the details and still find Deal’s first full-length solo release an intriguing and beguiling alternative rock album whose by turns melodic and dissonant songs slither subtly under your skin. Long-time fans who would happily hear her sing the phonebook will doubtless be joined by new listeners who soon feel the same about her singularly affecting vocals.
We’re now further away from the angular, ageless Breeders debut – Pod, surely a key proto-riot grrrl LP – than that release was from… well, from the birth of Kim and Kelley Deal. So it would be foolish to anticipate an equivalent vibe on this record, even if solo albums weren’t so often a vehicle for material that for whatever reason doesn’t quite belong elsewhere. Various Breeders come and go on these recordings, and long-time guiding light Steve Albini (RIP) is at least partially at the controls on most tracks, but there’s more of a continuity with those 7” singles than anything preceding; their home-demo aesthetic broadening; the palette extended, letting light in; embracing sea, sky and summer.
The eponymous opening track bursts into an unexpected, elaborate yet economical orchestral flourish; follow up ‘Coast’ lulls the listener with jovial trumpet and trombone, and ‘Summertime’ features cello, violin, ukulele, and a typically evocative, expressive vocal that sees Kim “push off in the night” in allusion to the LP’s cover image: adrift on an ocean raft, with nothing but a guitar, amp, monitor and generator. Oh, and a flamingo, more on which later. Interspersed with these gentle pieces are spasms of a harder-edged soundtrack, with the dynamic ‘Crystal Breath’ and ‘Big Ben Beat’ akin to something Karen O might more usually vocalise over; better still is the driving, emotive ‘Disobedience’, which like the closing track ‘A Good Time Pushed’ features a bigger band (inc. Kelley & Jim Breeder) whipping up a fuller, wilder noise.
According to the album notes Kim has a “current obsession with the concept of failure”; however accurate that observation is(n’t) it invokes the question of whether success is found in the exclusive/hierarchical frame of some or other competition, or resides in creating the art you want, regardless of external criteria, whether that takes ten or forty years. If success is winning, which by definition can only ever be temporary, then as a design for living, to paraphrase Crisp, failure may be more our style.
The album is interwoven with the Deal dialectic: “intense personal little masterpieces” (Albini) interrogating related existential themes; songs which, to quote the album notes again “are voodoo dolls of herself”: “I really should duck and roll out of my life”; “I may find deep regret waiting for me in the end”; “part of me wants to follow you off of this world”; and my personal fav, “if this is all there is, I’m fucked!” On the other hand, sentiments like “I don’t know where I am and I don’t care” and “I was made to radiate out” could be read the opposite way, with the hauntingly sung “we stare at the stupid stars.. we are what we’re waiting for”, representing a hesitant mindfulness; while ‘disobedience!’ is the defiantly memorable earworm from the song of that name.
When you discover that this album’s cover is inspired by artist Bas Jan Ader, who tried to sail the Atlantic in a tiny boat in 1975 and was never seen again, tragic mortality is nonetheless counterpointed by Kim’s chosen companion: a model flamingo. Just as this is musically and thematically both her lightest and her heaviest album so far, Kim stares down the abyss with humour and irony intact. The album closes with final words – “we’re having a good time; I’ll see you around” – that feel, like the record as a whole, somehow both valedictory and introductory at the same time. A kind of bye; a sort of aloha.
‘Nobody Loves You More’ is released on 22nd November on 4AD