Album: The Breeders, Mountain Battles (4AD)

Mountain Battles is the first Breeders album in six years. Frankly, I regret they didn't take a leaf out of the Was Bros' book and wait three times as long.

Perhaps then they might have made an album as satisfying as Boo!, with well-thought-out, fully finished songs rather than these wisps and sketches. The opener "Overglazed" is typical; just the phrase "I can feel it" repeated over what sounds like the band limbering up, as if repetition might will the song into existence. Throughout, grimly plodding rhythms carry minimal guitar figures and the occasional keyboard phrase, with the Deal sisters' vocals restricted to the narrowest of ranges.

The only time this meagre formula works to a song's advantage is "Night of Joy", where the skeletal arrangement aptly embodies the emotional suffocation experienced between the frustration of separation and the anticipation of reunion. Elsewhere, "Here No More" sounds like a half-formed pastiche of an Appalachian death ballad and "Regalame Esta Nocha" a twangsome norteño lament, though neither is carried off with notable style or panache.

Download this: 'Night of Joy'

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