The Breeders
Title TK
Elektra

It always felt easier to blame the demise of the Pixies on Frank Black. The way the group split — Black announced it to the public before he told his bandmates — just solidified the frontman's reputation as an incredibly talented person who was largely an asshole. But the new Breeders album, Title TK, might make some reconsider the blame game. Perhaps Kim Deal really is as hard to deal with as Black alleged, considering what a half-assed job she has done with this new album.

Title TK traffics in insane mundaneness. Only three songs on this album are memorable — "Full on Idle" simply because Kim Deal has recorded it before, "Sinister Foxx" because the lyrics are so awful and "Off You" because it's actually really good. As for the other nine, who cares?

"Full on Idle" initially appeared on Pacer, a disc by the Deal-led side project The Amps. It's a good, straightforward pop-punk tune, the kind The Breeders do best. The decision to re-record a previously released song for an album nearly nine years in the making, however, shows both Deal's arrogance in thinking fans would settle for this kind of bullshit, as well as the extreme dearth of quality material the band had to work with.

Nearly all the rest of the album attests to that paucity. In "Sinister Foxx," by far the most obnoxious song anyone even remotely connected to the Pixies has ever recorded, Deal coos the asinine phrase, "Has anyone seen the iguana?" 15 times in just over four minutes. The song rambles on without a single redeeming characteristic or the slightest hint of a melody, yet it's Title TK's second-longest track. It's beyond awful. No amount of drug use, which played a large part in the group's hiatus, can excuse something this bad.

Deal does manage to stumble onto something quite sublime with "Off You," though. Clearly little work went into the rest of the tracks, but on "Off You," the lack of effort gives way to effortlessness, another thing entirely. The song is slow and morose and sparingly recorded — the arrangement consisting of little more than clean guitar sounds, the hum of a bass and Deal's croak.

How, over the span of nearly nine years, The Breeders were able only to come up with one really good song is completely bewildering. The list of exceptional songs Deal has penned is impressive, but the piss-poor job she does on Title TK nearly erases her accomplishments. Title TK is reminiscent of why families are advised not to look at autopsy photos: Don't sully positive memories with gory snapshots of loved ones at their worst.

— Yancey Strickler (ystrickler@yahoo.com)