Nobody Loves You More
by Kim Deal
Former Pixies bassist Kim Deal has been a team player: Pixies, The Breeders and The Amps which began as a solo project but evolved into a band.
But at 63, she now appears under her own name, recording with various Breeders, Teenage Fanclub members and Steve Albini.
Given much of the album was written during or after the Covid lockdown and her mother, father, other family members and Albini all died within 18 months, there are inevitable reflections on mortality and the weight of days: “Beat by beat I’m feeling out of phase, just another domino falling on my face” in Crystal Breath.
But Deal – like Pixies and Breeders – has an ear for pop hooks and history: Coast is a horn-enhanced pop ballad opening with, “I’ve had a hard, hard landing, I really should duck and roll out of my life”, but then shifts focus to emotional renewal of “beautiful kids on the coast” enjoying life.
A Good Time Pushed (“I’m dull and you’re doomed. I want a big change, I want volume”) and Disobedience (“I go where I want”) put her in Breeders grit-pop territory.
The heartbreakingly delicate meditation with pedal steel Are You Mine was prompted by that question from her mother suffering dementia: “Let me go where there’s no memory of you, where everything is new.”
It’s among the best on an album thematically coherent but frequently ricocheting off into tangents, like the appealing but abruptly swerving title track and the inchoate BBB, which make for disrupted appreciation.
Incidentally, the disturbingly Dali-esque cover and string-swathed Summerland reference Dutch performance artist Bas Jan Ader who disappeared at sea in 1975, the same character Conor Oberst sings about on the current Bright Eyes album Five Dice, All Threes.
Another someone adrift.
You Still Got Me
by Beth Hart
In 2000, this country gave blues-rock belter Hart her first number one anywhere with LA Song. At the time she was in recovery because of drugs, disappointment, emotional damage, slogging it out through clubs and – a measure of her vocal power – playing Janis Joplin in an off-Broadway musical.
She still had troubles, but a decade ago released her moving, soul-baring Better Than Home album. She has recorded with Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck and Joe Bonamassa, been nominated for blues awards (won her share, too) and her previous album was the powerful if pointlessly faithful A Tribute to Led Zeppelin.
This 11th solo album – with guest guitarists Slash and Eric Gales – doesn’t have Better Than Home’s sustained emotional depth, but she enjoys the click-clack Wanna Be Big Bad Johnny Cash (“and the whole damn world can kiss my arse”), cabaret narrative Never Underestimate a Girl, nasty Pimp Like That and the rock’n’roll blast of Savior with a Razor featuring guitarist Slash. Although her voice can peel paint (Don’t Call the Police), Hart is most affecting on blues ballads: Wonderful World, the personal Little Heartbreak Girl, the soulful and soaring You Still Got Me.
An uneven, intermittently impressive album where the final track might be a product description: Machine Gun Vibrato.
Nobody Loves You More is available digitally, on cassette, CD and vinyl. You Still Got Me is available digitally.
