The Breeders

A new album from the Breeders “would be special no matter how it sounded,” said Glenn Gamboa in Newsday. The pioneering alternative rock group hasn’t released any new material in nine years, and hasn’t recorded anything with its 1993 lineup since that year’s Last Splash, a huge crossover hit. But singer-guitarist Kim Deal “clearly had something huge planned for this reunion.” All Nerve revives the surrealist humor of the band’s best work, yet it’s “an ambitious, cannonball-size comeback” that “shows how much the Breeders have grown in their time apart.” Kim and her twin, Kelley, are up front again, and, as before, the Breeders’ fractured rock “gets its bizarre spark from the tension between the Deal sisters’ ethereal harmonies and their dissonant dual-guitar squall,” said Terence Cawley in The Boston Globe. The album barely clocks in at 30 minutes, “but it still manages to feel epic,” especially on “Spacewoman” and “Howl at the Summit,” songs that “build to downright anthemic choruses.”