#susan volez

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Kim Deal Album Review: Nobody Loves You More

(4AD)

BY JORDAN MAINZER

The debut album from former Pixies bassist and vocalist and Breeders frontwoman Kim Deal has been a long time in the making. It also, appropriately, feels like it's been around for as much time as classic records like Doolittle and Pod. Deal first started releasing solo music as part of a vinyl series in 2013, right around the time she left the Pixies and The Breeders' celebrated twenty years of Last Splash with a reissue and full-album tour. Two of those songs, the touching "Are You Mine?" and "Wish I Was", appear on Nobody Loves You More, an album that's an encapsulation of Deal's life and musical career and sees her collaborate with musicians old and new, all fitting and natural. Whether she's happy on the beach or sad on the beach, reflective or reeking of now-or-never desperation, Deal's alive.

Perhaps more impressive than Deal's chemistry with the wide range of musicians that grace Nobody Loves You More is the diversity of the instrumentation and number of personnel, and the resulting variance in sound. She frequently features string and horn arrangements. On the album's opening and title track, Deal's slinky guitar embeds within Susan Volez' violin, at once sweeping and cinematic and melancholy. By the time Michael Mavridoglou's trumpets blare, Britt Walford's steady and clacking drums disintegrate into ramshackle fills, momentary noise that retreats to the song's original motif. The moment is a microcosm of Nobody Loves You More as a whole, how it segues in and out of moments of chaos. For instance, the third track, "Crystal Breath", breaks the suggestion of the first two songs--that Nobody Loves You More might be a nonetheless warm "bummer in the sun" record--and layers Deal's vocals atop crunchy percussion. "Beat by beat, I'm feeling out of phase / Just another domino falling on my face," she sings, accompanied by only her sister Kelley on bass. The aesthetic matches the the theme: somebody in solitude, dangerously alone with their existential thoughts. "Disobedience", rife with harmonic guitars and thudding snares, is similar in ethos, Deal alternating between expressions of desire ("I wanna ride on the Ferris wheel / And a pop") and anxiety ("If this all is we are / I'm fucked!").

These grounded songs are necessary to contrast the moments where Deal has her head in the clouds, and vice versa. On paper, a song like "Bats In The Afternoon Sky" seems like an interlude, but its 90 seconds of whooshing and wordless vocals are a true palate cleanser following "Big Ben Beat", where Deal's sunny riffs are subsumed by the distorted bile of two Savages: Fay Milton (not on drums, but playing synths and strings) and Ayşe Hassan (bass). "Bats In The Afternoon Sky" previews the starry-eyed nature of "Summerland", but on the latter, Deal's optimism is also pure and honest. Inspired by winter vacations with her parents in the Florida Keys, the song paints a picture of a child who never wants to get out of the water. "I'm not even tired," Deal declares, "This world's for me."

Ultimately, where Deal truly shines on Nobody Loves You More are on the heartbreakers. The two released a decade ago, "Are You Mine?" and "Wish I Was", are respectively biographical and abstract, and continue to stand out. The former disguises itself as a slow-dance love song, but it's actually about her mother's dementia, sung from the point of view as a patient. "Let me go / Where there's no / Memory of you / Where everything is new / And nothing is true," Deal sings, accompanied by Dave Easley's high and lonesome pedal steel. Her delivery on "Wish I Was", meanwhile, cuts deep; if the song starts breezy enough, with jangly Velvets-style guitars, Deal singing, "Standing strong, it makes me wish I was...young" is enough to send you into a spiral. And then there's album closer "A Good Time Pushed", tracked with the late, great Steve Albini in 2022. Again, Deal's words pierce through a bed of noise: bendy bass and syncopated keys, Jim MacPherson's crisp drums, crisscrossed guitar patterns from Patrick Himes and Raymond McGinley. "Part of me wants to follow you off of this world," begins Deal, eerily prescient. "You quit the noise, put it behind us / Drive a stake they'll never find us." But it's the ditching of the idealism for a resigned, "I'll see you around," that's the most matter-of-fact admission on an album full of them. When she sings, "Now is the time / For me to get what I want," it makes me think that the album's title is but an incomplete sentence, one that should end with, "Than You (Should) Love Yourself."