Kim Deal - Nobody Loves You More


Yippee! My copy of Nobody Loves You More, the new Kim Deal album, finally arrived. It took quite a journey from New York to Des Moines, then headed the wrong way over to Davenport, then back through Des Moines, and finally to me. It's fine, actually, i didn't have the new OS up and running properly until yesterday anyway. I somehow piped everything the wrong way and the volume control kept creating new audio sockets every time I raised or lowered it, eventually crashing everything. All fixed now, so bring on the quirky songs about loving me, or loving myself, or whoever it turns out loves whomever in a comparatively measurable way.

Kim Deal is of course famous as the bassist of Pixies and frontwoman of her own band The Breeders, but this is a solo album with 19 other random and not so random people. I kid, of course, but part of my brain wants a "solo album" to be literally solo. I know, I know, it's her first time, i should be gentle (please note that joke is neither sexist nor mysogynistic, it's merely in poor taste). Not even going to pretend for a second I didn't have a huge adolescent crush on Kim Deal. Probably still do in one of these bottles around here...

Like it or not, I'm a critic, and criticism, for me, is about using superfluous commas [snap] I mean openly confronting your own biases. I'm going to like this record no matter what it turns out to be, so it's my responsibility to describe what that IS is as objectively as possible. It's a serious contender against Kim Gordon's The Collective for Bottle Of Beef's Album of the year award (no prize, unfortunately).

K, well, i don't know how else to tell you this, but the album is a love letter/eulogy to Steve Albini. It probably almost certainly didn't start out that way, these songs are about all sorts of stuff and the earliest date back to 2011 or so, but as essentially a compilation album of songs without a prior home or context just released now, it's about Steve Albini. It's also fucking awesome. 

You get big night-club orchestra ballads, crunchy alt rock, a couple electro-trash experiments, and an overwhelmingly grounded approach to living life near the end of life. You know what it is? It's gorgeously mortal, and an amazing example of how putting songs together as an album adds up to something magically bigger than anything the individual songs are about. 

What more could you possibly ask for in an album? Listening to the album is a completely different experience from listening to the 11 songs on it. 

Magnifique.

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