Breeders are back for twentieth anniversary of LAST SPLASH
Webster Hall
125 East 11th St. between Second & Third Aves.
Thursday, December 19, and Friday, December 20, $30, 8:00
www.websterhall.com
www.breedersdigest.net
www.speedyortiz.bandcamp.com
Twenty years ago, indie supergroup the Breeders exploded onto the scene with their second full-length album, The Last Splash, which featured the monster hit “Cannonball,” reaching platinum heights propelled by an ultracool video directed by the impossibly hip team of Spike Jonze and Kim Gordon. Consisting of bassist Josephine Wiggs from the Perfect Disaster, drummer Jim Macpherson, and twin-sister guitarists Kim and Kelley Deal from the Pixies (Kelley replaced original Breeder Tanya Donelly of the Throwing Muses, who went on to form Belly), the band created a punchy, infectious sound that influenced such other groups as Nirvana, whom the Breeders opened for on a European stint. The Breeders are celebrating the twentieth anniversary of The Last Splash, which also includes such gems as “Invisible Man,” “Flipside,” “No Aloha,” and “Drivin’ on 9,” with the release of the deluxe box set LSXX (4ad, May 2013) and a tour in which they are playing the record in full. They’ll be doing so at Webster Hall on December 19 & 20, adding all of 1990’s Pod as well. But be sure to get there early, because you won’t want to miss Northampton’s Speedy Ortiz, a band whose music evokes the heyday of the Breeders.
Speedy Ortiz will open Breeders shows at Webster Hall (photo by Noe Richards)
Named after a street-gang punk in Jaime Hernandez’s Love and Rockets comics, Speedy Ortiz is currently on the road in support of its debut album, Major Arcana (Carpark, July 2013), a ten-song treat in which the band is constantly changing tempos and volume, offering tantalizing surprises every step of the way. Guitarist and lead singer Sadie Dupuis writes the music first, then adds lyrics that fit into her shifting melodies. “Was it the teeth or my tongue that said / ‘Go shut your lips, let us take a rest’? / Oh, my mouth is a factory / for every toxic part of speech I spew,” she begins on “Tiger Tank,” adding, “Oh, my face is a label / to convey how very awfully I’m doing.” In its short three-year history, Speedy Ortiz hasn’t been doing awfully at all, releasing the cult hit “Taylor Swift” (“Blood-shaking, clot-making viper that feeds on a mouse / Poaching the eggs of the snakes that I slayed in the South), an EP called Sports that includes songs about basketball, indoor soccer, and curling, and the speaker-rattling Major Arcana and have the EP Real Hair, featuring “Everything’s Bigger,” scheduled for early 2014, reteaming them with Pixies producer Paul Q. Kolderie, who worked on the “Taylor Swift” / “Swim Fan” single. Dupuis, shredding guitarist Matt Robidoux, Christmas-born bassist Darl Ferm, and drummer Mike Falcone will be opening for the Breeders at the Webster Hall shows before going off on their first European tour.
Robert Altman’s self-described “anti-Western” starts off gently enough, as John McCabe (Warren Beatty) rides slowly into a dark, dank northwestern town in 1902, Leonard Cohen’s “The Stranger Song” playing over the opening credits. But Altman (M*A*S*H, Nashville) is merely setting the stage for what is to come, the electric combination of Julie Christie and Beatty as two businesspeople building a new town in the Old West. Beatty plays gentleman gambler John McCabe, who is soon joined by madam Constance Miller (Christie) in running the local brothel, and pretty much the town itself, which catches the eye of a mining company that decides it wants in on the action, something McCabe and Mrs. Miller are not about to let happen, at least not without one helluva fight. Filmed mostly in sequential order, McCabe & Mrs. Miller unfolds like an epic poem, thanks to Altman and cowriter Brian McKay’s imaginative and unpredictable script, based on Edmund Naughton’s 1959 novel, McCabe, and Vilmos Zsigmond’s gorgeous cinematography. The film is visually spectacular, as Altman cuts from the dreamlike red velvet interiors of Mrs. Miller’s brothel to the expansive land outside, bathed in the beautiful yet ominous falling snow. The Oscar-nominated Christie and Beatty do the love-hate thing to perfection, something they would duplicate in 1975 when they teamed up in Hal Ashby’s Shampoo and again in 1978 in Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait. A clear influence on such Clint Eastwood gems as High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a marvelous picture that ranks right up there with the best Westerns — “anti-“ or otherwise — ever made. The stellar cast also includes Rene Auberjonois, Michael Murphy, Bert Remsen, Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine, William Devane, and John Schuck, with Cohen contributing several more songs to the soundtrack. And the ending — well, it’s one of cinema’s most unforgettable finales. McCabe & Mrs. Miller is screening December 7 & 8 at 11:30 am as part of Nitehawk Cinema’s “Country Brunchin’” series and will be preceded by a live performance by Brooklyn’s own