Leave it to The Breeders' Kelley Deal to call a spade a spade: “Why aren’t you people at home? It’s a fucking blizzard!” And to get in all the good wisecracks: when an audience member offered to have them play at his house, she quipped, “what kind of drugs you got?”

It was funny not just because it was widely reported that both Deal sisters are now sober, but also because the band were actually visibly nervous — as Kelley kept reminding us, this was only their second time performing the new songs off their upcoming disc Mountain Battles. But there was an affectionate vibe in the room, owing at least in part to having an audience who came out not only for an early show so as to not displace the usual Phoenix Saturday dance party, but who braved an outrageous snow storm to hear a band who will have put out four albums in twenty years when the next one comes out in April.

Listening to the set composed almost entirely of new material, and knocked out with aplomb by a four and sometimes five-piece (additional touring guitarist “Cheryl from Florida”, per Kelley, played on about half the songs), I realized that as a songwriter, being in The Pixies was both the best and the worst thing that could have happened to Kim Deal: the best because coolly sly songs like quasi-single “Bang On”, with its refrain of “I want no one and no one wants me, I’m missing, I’m missing”, are too idiosyncratic to have won them such a wide audience without the Pixies reflected glory; and the worst because that audience sometimes fails to appreciate them. Nobody goes nuts for songs they’ve never or rarely heard before, but the gulf between the audience’s reaction to, say, "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" (which teetered but didn’t go off the rails completely) and the quiet “Spark” was striking.

The old tunes did sound fantastic, especially “Cannonball” with its pummeling walls of distorted vocals — in hindsight, it’s lucky for them, and us, that the one song they can’t get away with not playing is so tricky that they have to engage with it, otherwise they’d fuck it up — but from set opener “Overglazed”, which with its echoing vocals and thundering riff resembled a gang of giants descending from a mountaintop, to the languid and stunning “We’re Gonna Rise”, the new numbers actually surpassed the old. There aren’t too many shows I’d stumble through a blizzard for, but this was one of them, and it was well worth it.

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