NOTE: All photos are copyright of Dean Keim 2025
Alternative rock icon Kim Deal brought her very first solo tour to Brooklyn’s gloriously beautiful Brooklyn Paramount to support Nobody Loves You More, the first solo album of her lengthy and illustrious career which has become my most adored and heavily-played album of the year so far. I grew up outside of Dayton, Ohio and, in my formative high school years of the late 80’s, I knew of Kim as one of the only genuine rock stars to come from my hometown apart from the band Guided By Voices, whom I did also love from the moment I was finally exposed to their debauchery. She had been playing music since she was a kid, but after she joined up with a Boston band called The Pixies as bassist and backing vocalist in 1986, she became a real rock star as she helped to define the new alternative rock revolution that blew up the music industry in the late 80’s and early 90’s. The band was fronted by Frank Black, but from their second breakthrough album Surfer Rosa, she started fronting at least one song per album and those incredible tracks brought her a lot of attention which, unfortunately, created a considerable amount of tension between the two singers.
As early as 1988, she had been exploring her own voice with a side project called the Breeders that initially involved Throwing Muses guitarist Tanya Donelly but did eventually also involve Kim’s twin sister Kelley Deal who she had been playing with since she was a child. After she finally broke with the Pixies in 1991, Kim and Kelly committed to the Breeders full time and they encountered huge commercial success with their second album Last Splash in 1994. As they embraced their newfound fame with big time events like playing the main stage of Lollapalooza and opening for Nirvana on their massive final tour (which I saw in Denver), it all came to a very sudden end after Kelley had to go into rehab for heroin addiction and, even though Kim did continue on with what would have been the next Breeders album rebranded as the band The Amps, she did seem to languish as an artist a bit in the last 90’s. That was until 2002 when she did come back from the ashes like a fiery Phoenix as she reunited with her sister for another Breeders outing, as well as reassembling with The Pixies for a couple of reunion tours. That seemed to fall apart around 2012, when she began express her desire to be solo act with some solitary gigs and independent singles recordings. Still, it took another whole decade and then some for her to finally release her full-length solo opus. However, the wait really paid off with this amazing album that really feels like it captured the youthful ambiance of her 90’s creative heyday while still exploring new worlds of melody and style, and I must say she really sounds and looks as though she has been reborn anew with a really youthful creative glow.
The Chicago band Ratboys opened the show with a powerful set showing off why they have built up a following for their deep roots indie rock sound that they’ve been crafting since 2010. Although they have released at least five full-length albums, they really seemed to catch fire with their last disc, 2023’s The Window (produced by Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla) but it seems clear that this band is poised for a breakthrough of their own and they even played some new tracks in their set like the extremely impressive “Strange Love”. Julia Steiner is a charmingly disarming front woman, and guitarist Dave Sagan is a very powerful axeman, and while bassist Sean Neumann was also impressive, it was drummer Marcus Nuccio that often stole the show with some really otherworldly beat work behind the kit.
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For this tour Kim brought along a 10-piece band that included strings, horns, and singers, bringing out a certain island flavor that cooks behind her new album. The two backing vocalists included her sister Kelley Deal (who is also featured quite a lot of the new album) as well as Lung’s Kate Wakefield, helping add that unique Deal harmony. In NYC, Philly, and DC, guitarist Harrison Whitford who is best known for his work with Phoebe Bridgers substituted for Frames and Swell Season axeman Rob Bochnik, who is playing on the rest of the tour. The setlist did not have as much of her classic hits as many would have probably liked and the night’s song selection was mostly based around the new album for a majority of the set. The horn section really cooked behind those songs, especially the swaying “Coast” and epic jams like “Big Ben Beat”, which absolutely blew the lid off the Paramount. They, combined with the rhythm section of bassist Mando Lopez and drummer Lindsay Glover, really exploded off the stage. However, the horns did kind of disappear in the latter half of the show, which left more room for the string section of cellist Alison Chesley and violinist Susan Voelz to really shine, especially as Deal started playing some older tracks like the Breeders’ “Night Of Joy” from 2008 which really radiated with some spooky strings, and even spiced up the more rockin’ “Pod” from their first effort back in 1990. She also played a couple of those previously mentioned early 2000’s singles “Walking with a Killer” and “Biker Gone” before taking a brief break, and thankfully coming back for an encore of “Off You” from 2002’s darkly toned Title TK comeback album, and finally ending with the fan fave “Do You Love Me Now?” from Last Splash, gibing some older fans a taste of their needed nostalgia fix. Still, after only about an hour for the entire set, it feels like she could have tacked on another whole set of classics and still gotten all us geriatrics back to bed at a reasonable hour. Even her Breeders’ sets often featured Pixies throwbacks like “Gigantic,” and the occasional Amps songs, which I thought would have been amazingly apropos as this album reminds me so much tonally of that often overlooked classic album. Still, it is quite Kim Deal has very much created something to be proud of.
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