Kim Deal: Nobody Loves You More (digital outlets)

Many years ago the British music writer Pete Frame would produce meticulously researched Rock Family Trees tracing the various comings and goings in scenes and bands, creating vast branches for groups like Fleetwood Mac.

If he ever did the influential Pixies branches would include the career of bassist Kim Deal who later founded the Breeders (with Tanya Donnelly of Throwing Muses), then Kim's twin sister Kelley joined.

It gets complicated.

Bassist Kim Deal – not in the current Pixies line-up that opened for Pearl Jam recently – has been a team player: Pixies, Breeders and The Amps which began as a solo project but evolved into a band.

But now, at 63, she steps up with an album under her own name recorded with various Breeders and Steve Albini.

Given much of the album was written when mother (whom she cared for), father, uncle, aunt and Albini all died in this period, you'd expect some meditations on mortality.

And they're certainly here: “Beat by beat I'm feeling out of phase, just another domino falling on my face” in the Crystal Breath

But Deal – like the Pixies and Breeders – has an ear for pop hooks and history: Coast is a 1950s pop ballad with horns opening with “I've had a hard, hard landing I really should duck and roll out out of my life” but then shifts focus to “beautiful kids on the coast” enjoying life.

A Good Time Pushed puts her in Breeders grit-pop territory (“I'm dull and you're doomed. I want a big change, I want volume . . . I'll see you around')

The heartbreaking and delicate Are You Mine was prompted by that question from her mother suffering dementia: “Let me go where there's no memory of you, where everything is new . . . I have no time”.

It's among the best on an album thematically coherent but frequently ricocheting off into tangents, like the heartache, appealing but abruptly swerving title track and the inchoate BBB which make for disrupted appreciation.

Incidentally, the cover image alludes to the Dutch performance art Bas Jan Ader who disappear at sea in 1975, the same character Conor Oberst sings about on the current Bright Eyes album Five Dice, All Threes.

Another someone adrift . . . and something in all these connection would make for some kind of Rock Family Tree.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here.