’90s nostaglia proved to be a powerful draw on Sunday night, bringing out a fairly large crowd for The Breeders’ show at The Phoenix in support of their latest, All Nerve.
Of course the evening wasn’t all about looking to the past. While openers Melkbelly acted as a good link between the past and present as a new band whose sound certainly seems indebted in some ways to the ’90s alt rock sound of the headliners, The Breeders themselves played a decent amount of tracks from the new album that sounded great and were generally well received by the crowd.
Overall, The Breeders put on an entertaining show, running the gamut from early classics like “Divine Hammer” and “Cannonball” to newer numbers “Wait In The Car” and “MetaGoth” (the latter featuring Josephine Wiggs on lead vocal) to covers of The Beatles (“Happiness Is A Warm Gun”) and even a tune from that other band that Kim Deal used to play in (The Pixies’ “Gigantic”).
While many in the crowd were plenty hyped up for the band – several of them bopped along as the band played and there were certainly a few whoops to be heard – the band had a bit of trouble keeping the momentum going at times, with a couple of moments between songs when Kim Deal had to take some time to deal with technical difficulties. The band handled it well though, demonstrating a good sense of humour about everything, such as when Kelly Deal leaned in to the mic to offer up some commentary on her sister’s sound issues.
“Someone’s annoyed. Let’s watch,” she joked as Kim worked on the issue, sounding as if she were the narrator in some sort of rock n’ roll based nature documentary. To be honest, that’s a show I would absolutely watch. Can someone fund this idea and get it into production ASAP? Thanks in advance.