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**The Amps - Pacer**
★★★★☆

In the grand mythology of alternative rock's golden age, few figures loom as large as Kim Deal. By 1995, the bassist-turned-songwriter had already helped craft two of the decade's most influential albums with the Pixies, then watched her own creation, The Breeders, implode spectacularly following the success of "Last Splash." What happened next reads like a cautionary tale about sibling rivalry, substance abuse, and the peculiar pressures of indie stardom – but it also gave us one of the era's most underrated gems.

The Amps emerged from the wreckage of The Breeders like a phoenix with a fuzzbox. After her twin sister Kelley's escalating drug problems made continuing The Breeders impossible, Kim Deal found herself in the unusual position of needing to reinvent herself yet again. Rather than retreat, she doubled down on the raw, garage-rock instincts that had always lurked beneath her more polished work. Recruiting guitarist Luis Lerma, bassist Nate Farley, and drummer Jim Macpherson (the latter a Breeders veteran), Deal assembled a unit that felt less like a supergroup and more like the kind of band that might emerge from any American suburb with enough determination and distortion pedals.

"Pacer" announces itself with the title track's sledgehammer riff and Deal's trademark deadpan delivery, but this isn't simply "Last Splash" redux. Where The Breeders had balanced pop sensibilities with experimental noise, The Amps pushed harder into garage-punk territory, embracing a deliberately lo-fi aesthetic that made even their catchiest moments feel slightly unhinged. The production, handled by Deal herself alongside engineer Steve Albini, captures the band in all their gloriously ramshackle glory – drums that sound like they're being played in a concrete bunker, guitars that seem perpetually on the verge of feeding back, and Deal's voice floating above it all with an almost eerie calm.

The album's strongest moments find Deal exploring the tension between melody and mayhem. "Tipp City" builds from a deceptively gentle opening into a wall of noise that would make Dinosaur Jr. proud, while "I Am Decided" showcases Deal's gift for wrapping subversive lyrics in deceptively straightforward arrangements. The real revelation, though, is "Bragging Party," a seven-minute epic that finds the band stretching out into genuinely experimental territory. What starts as a simple garage-rock stomp gradually morphs into something approaching krautrock, with Macpherson's metronomic drumming anchoring layers of feedback and repetitive riffing that feel both hypnotic and slightly threatening.

Deal's songwriting here is characteristically oblique, dealing in fragments and impressions rather than traditional narrative structures. On "Mom's Drunk," she delivers lines like "My mom's drunk in the basement" with the same matter-of-fact tone she might use to discuss the weather, transforming domestic dysfunction into art through sheer force of personality. It's this ability to find beauty in the mundane and unsettling that has always set Deal apart from her contemporaries, and it's on full display throughout "Pacer."

The album's rougher edges occasionally work against it – "Empty Glasses" feels like an idea in search of a song, and the closing "She's a Girl" doesn't quite justify its extended runtime. But these minor quibbles pale beside the album's considerable strengths. This is music that feels genuinely dangerous in a way that much '90s alternative rock only pretended to be, capturing a moment when one of indie rock's most important figures was operating without a safety net.

In the years since its release, "Pacer" has gradually been recognized as an essential document of mid-'90s underground rock. While The Amps proved to be a brief detour – Deal would eventually reunite with a clean Kelley to reform The Breeders – the album stands as proof of her restless creativity and unwillingness to repeat herself. In an era when many of her peers were already calcifying into self-parody, Deal was still pushing boundaries, still finding new ways to make noise that mattered.

"Pacer" may not have the immediate accessibility of "Last Splash" or the historical importance of "Doolittle," but it captures something equally valuable – an artist at the peak of her powers, uncompromising and unafraid. In the end, that