Revealing that your band’s fiddle player’s pet dog leaves the room each time she picks up her instrument is not the best way to build up enthusiasm for a song. It’s an especially mean thing to do when you’re talking about your sister. But that’s how Kim Deal of The Breeders introduced sibling Kelley, though only after getting a laugh from their mother’s Alzheimer’s. The way you do. Kim was not being falsely modest about her sister’s ability. It was comically excruciatingly bad fiddle playing. Awful as it was it added a lot to the relaxed atmosphere of an instore promotion of the band’s recent album Mountain Battles.

There’s a history with The Breeders and me and it’s taken a while to be able to forgive them . Way back when their song Cannonball was huge I thought I was dancing to it at a party. The woman I was going out with at the time pointed at me and started laughing, encouraging her friends to join in. She explained that in dancing there should be some relationship between the music and the movement. That was a conceptual leap too far and memories of the humiliation have kept me off the dance floor ever since.

This evening’s set was a lovely little showcase for one of the great American songwriters of the last couple of decades. The amplification in a space cleared at the front of the shop maybe didn’t do full justice to some of the louder songs but this was more than made up for being able to stand only a few feet away from the stage. While it’s fairly arbitrary to select highlights the standout track for me was Here No More, a piece of work that could have been performed by the Carter Family. Apparently it’s inspired by a hand written death certificate that Mrs Deal drew up for one of her daughters. You can see how ironic detachment might be a good survival tool in that house.

The release of the Mountain Battles album passed me by but on the strength of tonight’s show any reasonable person has to conclude that it’s an asset to any cd collection. In the meantime here’s a song that doesn’t have any unpleasant associations.