Song Highlight: The Breeders – “Metal Man”
And thoughts on its parent album, Pod
Pod, The Breeders’ debut album, has been one of my most-played this year, and I might write about it at length sometime for my Favorite Albums series. It’s one of the most 1990’s alternative-sounding albums ever, though it came out right at the start of the decade. And its influence on that decade of music is clear when you hear it; loud-quiet-loud dynamics, grungy guitar tones, but totally left of the dial. It makes sense why Kurt Cobain called it one of his favorite albums, it makes sense why Courtney Love was addicted to it while composing Live Through This, and it makes sense that The Breeders hit it big with their follow-up album Last Splash and its crossover hit, “Cannonball.”
But the thing about Pod is that it’s weird. It features a misfit, one-off lineup of collaborators that, if you’re into alternative rock music from this era, looks like a supergroup: Kim Deal of The Pixies and Tanya Donelly of Throwing Muses sharing both guitar and vocal duties, Britt Walford of Slint on drums, and Josephine Wiggs of The Perfect Disaster on bass. To top it off, Steve Albini (Big Black, Shellac) handles production, and his influence is all over the sound of this album. Featuring compositions mainly written by Kim, Pod feels like a creative flurry of music that is unafraid of coloring outside of the lines of traditional song structure and arrangement. Songs such as “Glorious” and “Oh!” are awkwardly constructed but nonetheless engrossing songs that feel unpredictable even after I’ve heard them many times. Guitar riffs don’t go where you’d expect them to, instruments enter and exit at unexpected moments, and vocals play an ephemeral role. As a listening experience, Pod feels motivic and somehow complex despite its stripped-down arrangements. Each performer on the album feels like he/she knows exactly what to contribute and how to do so, making the whole peculiar thing come off as just natural.
Lyrically, Pod is full of weird sexual stuff that positions the illicit as typical, describing situations as impassionate and more transactional than anything. The name of the album is intended to invoke the image of a uterus, and the cover art is a blurred image of a man with eels tied around his waist performing a mating ritual dance. The lyrics across the album read like scraps of paper from a fucked-up Kamasutra on songs like “When I Was a Painter” and “Only in 3’s.” The Breeders even manage to transform The Beatles’ perverse “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” into a song that sounds like their own composition, and made the composition even weirder by discarding the outro of it almost entirely.
All of these themes found in Pod can be heard on its final track and the song that gave me recent renowned interest in the album, “Metal Man.” As I listen to this song over and over again while writing this, I am still baffled by how The Breeders, or any band for that matter, can compose a song like this. It begins with an acoustic guitar riff panned off to the left channel, which immediately disappears once a second guitar enters in the right channel. A few seconds later, Josephine Wiggs’ voice enters also on the right channel, the first and only time she sings on Pod. In her unfamiliar English accent, she speaks a cryptic verse:
I don’t know how old I was…
…but it was a ’65 pickup.
I was lying on the ground
With flat iron bars over my head.
After which, Kim joins Josephine on a great chorus set to two acoustic guitars:
One silver drop
Is all you need
To put a hole in your head
At 2,000 degrees
That’s right man, you be the metal man
At 2,000 degrees
And that’s hot.
The lyrics of “Metal Man” continue in Pod’s themes of odd sexual experiences. The final line, “and that’s hot,” is repeated as the chorus ends, working as a double entendre about deriving some sort of pleasure from hot liquid. The text of the whole song reads as a vaguely icky sexual awakening arisen by maintaining cars. It reminds me of the nightmarish, noisy electronic-dance composition “Warm Leatherette” by The Normal, a striking song about “warm leatherette melt[ing] on your burning chest” that was inspired by the novel Crash by J.G. Ballard. Like other songs from Pod, the text is not expressed as sensual, but merely sexual in nature. The second verse sounds like some disturbing scene from a David Cronenberg movie:
And over my head,
The hot wire was sparkling.
I got something down on my chest
And it began to bubble.
A disorienting and poetic set of lyrics that creates an especially odd feeling as the final track of the album.
Moving back to the composition and arrangement, “Metal Man” features a few twists and turns that keeps the song unpredictable throughout its runtime. Aside from the chorus, the accompanying acoustic guitar in the left channel blinks in and out of the song, a characteristic of pretty much all the instruments on all the songs on Pod. One of the strangest moments of it comes right before the second verse, where the entirely acoustic song suddenly has the full band come barreling through: distorted electric guitars roar in, and Britt’s booming drum kit brings up the tempo as a grungy take on the song’s main riff enters out of nowhere. Then, it leaves almost as soon as it appears, lasting only about eight seconds. Eight seconds?! I have no idea why this section was included, but it seems almost like a tease of the “loud-quiet-loud” compositional style popularized by The Pixies (which Kim mostly avoids in her songwriting on Pod) that is then subverted by returning to its sparse acoustic sound. Or perhaps it serves to provide a transition for a change in the song’s mix after the band dissipates: during the second verse and until the end of the song, the acoustic guitar sounds more distant, but fills more of the mix.
On the production side, “Metal Man” has Steve Albini’s fingerprints all over it. His roomy and spacious production turns this song into a very unique experience on headphones. From the beginning, there’s a sense of depth as the two guitars play on opposite sides with nothing occupying the middle of the audio plane. I love the somewhat distant, wet (as opposed to dry, untreated) sound to the guitars during the second half of the song, effectively creating a discernible space in which the song exists in performance. There is also random, ‘fly on the wall’ chatter included towards the end that enhances the roominess, a technique that Steve also uses on albums like The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and Slint’s Tweez. As a whole, Pod is an album that benefits so greatly from this style of production, and brings a lot of intrigue to “Metal Man” purely in the way it’s approached as a recorded track.
The last aspect of “Metal Man” that I’d like to mention is its approach to guitar playing. The two guitars on it only use a few strings for each chord, never playing more than maybe four notes at a time. That, along with being played on a Spanish guitar, or classical guitar, with nylon strings, gives it the muted quality that makes the song a unique listening experience. I also like how the guitars switch to single notes coming out of the chorus (“And that’s hot…”), which is unusual in the riffy style of alternative rock. The Breeders’ willingness to play just one note on the guitar as the main hook is somewhat of a key characteristic of their music: their song “Safari” is pretty much this idea taken to the extreme. It also leaves a lot of space for the other instruments that get overshadowed by the blocky distortion of electric guitars.
Finally, the song ends in a lackadaisical manner, trailing off in its main riff before dissipating along with the chatter. It’s a pretty weird way to conclude a song (and an album for that matter), making “Metal Man” a strangely captivating experience. Almost psychedelic, eliciting a “what did I just hear?” response without having any of the sounds that we’d associate with psychedelia. Easily one of my favorite songs on Pod, I highly recommend listening to it with attention for all of its eccentricity and intricacy.
Further exploration
Some of the info used in this essay was gathered from a podcast feature about Pod put together by Janice Headley for KEXP’s retrospective series The Cobain 50. Recommended if you’d like to learn more about Pod, check it out here!
Pod Demos – Early demos for material on Pod, some of which didn’t make it to the album. If you like this album as much as I do, then this is a must-listen, especially for the outtake “Rave On” alone.