Last Splash (30th Anniversary Edition)

Few albums capture the charm, mystery, and offhand grace of ’90s indie rock like *Last Splash*. Lead vocalist Kim Deal, at the time best known as the bassist in the recently disbanded Pixies, had formed the band a few years earlier with Throwing Muses’ Tonya Donelly and released 1990’s *Pod*, an album brought to broader recognition in no small part through the endorsement of Kurt Cobain (“They’re strong women…but you can sense they love men at the same time”). In the rush to capitalize on the success of Nirvana’s *Nevermind*, *Last Splash* and its lead single “Cannonball” were given a platform that music so casual and strange would’ve never been given 10 years earlier. But the band still seemed irretrievably like outsiders, at once too normal and suburban to fit in with the artists and too dreamy to fit in anywhere else. “It was popular at the time to be unhappy or depressed,” guitarist—and Kim’s twin—Kelley Deal explained later, adding, in her flatly enigmatic way, “but we weren’t unhappy or depressed.” Where Nirvana had rage and humor and Sonic Youth felt like a product of the avant-garde, *Last Splash* felt like it came from both a sweeter and stranger place. The Deal sisters used to sing Hank Williams and Buddy Holly and Everly Brothers songs at the local biker bar in Dayton, Ohio, while still in high school—an innocence you could hear in the cheer-team catchiness of “Cannonball” and “Divine Hammer” and the barely contained yearning of “Do You Love Me Now?”, which felt like a prom slow dance transposed onto basement indie rock. Music wasn’t their revenge, or their coping mechanism for being social outcasts. It was just something they…played. So where did these fumbling, erotic half-songs come from? That feeling of being a kid and tracing the walls with your fingers in a darkened house at night that comes through “Roi”? The way the noisy chorus of “Hag” explodes like garage floodlights onto an empty driveway after being triggered by some unseen motion? *Last Splash* cut deeper than almost everything we call “dream pop” in part because it found its dreaminess in places you’d never expect: the sameness of suburbia, the silence of the local sports bar. For all its informality, the music vibrates with an almost subconscious heat. The Breeders were the girls next door.