Pixies: Classic or Dud

the way the piano fades out on motorway to roswell with two piano tracks is so perfect, save navajo know for an album opener then imo

never!
it's ok, we can agree to disagree.

you guys started talking about Frank Black and now Speedy Marie is racing thru my head <3

I started a thread once

Albums with a genius penultimate track, and sucky final track

good lord what is my govt name doing there

haha I was about to post Protection on that thread... AGAIN

Trompe le Monde is my favourite Pixies album, haters = crazy.

OTM. I got into the Pixies after Bossa Nova, and when Trompe Le Monde came out I fell in love with it immediately. It's been my favorite of theirs ever since.

In 1991 I remember thinking why would anyone listen to Nirvana when you have the Pixies?

I started at Doolittle (as I imagine many people did) and by the time TLM came out, it sounded really pop. Which is WAY better than sounding like adult contemporary with a slightly rough edge (All Shook Down), esp at the time. What was Bob Mould doing? Oh, just releasing the most depressed person album ever made (Black Sheets of Rain)

Pixies was still fun young people music, instead of being sad old people music (ie songs about divorce and being old)

That said, I p much never want to hear Doolittle more than once a decade from now on.

I recorded a radio show in April 1988 on the Dutch VPRO radio station when they first kinda started to explode in the the low countries and I wrote down what was in the charts at the time on the tape cover (I guess I had the feeling this new band was going to be important and it signalled the end of an era) - so this is what was in the charts over here in BE and NL when the Pixies first came over here:

Gimme hope Jo'anna - Eddy Grant
Stop loving you - Toto
Play it cool - Freiheit
Beds are burning - Midnight Oil
Don't turn around - Aswad
Tell it to my heart - Taylor Dayne
Yé ké yé ké - Mory Kante
Somewhere down the crazy river - Robbie Robertson
I need you - B.V.S.M.P.
Heart - Pet Shop Boys
One more try - George Michael
Wishing I was lucky - Wet Wet Wet
Can I play with madness - Iron Maiden
Alphabet Street - Prince

:-)

wow
kinda shocked!

and now compare that with the youthful Pixies charming the pants off everyone with the funnest music ever: Vamos, Broken Face, Isla De Encanta, Tony's Theme, Gigantic, Bone Machine, Something Against You, Ed Is Dead, Nimrod's Son, Where Is My Mind?, Levitate Me, Brick Is Red

Those are much more interesting choices for gateway songs -- i was reliant on the public library and local public radio station to inform me beyond what i found on newsstands and commercial radio (ie not much). As I mentioned, Here Comes Your Man was the song that I heard first because I heard it on 89.1 (local radio, not NPR) and then I pursued from there.

I got into The Pixies because someone played "I've Been Tired" for me on a bus ride back from German camp and I immediately decided to buy one of their albums; since I couldn't remember the name of the song or what release it was on, I just bought Doolittle.

would like to note that meanwhile, pants were being charmed off (occasionally), as many in my peer group heard "la la love you" on the mixtape that skater/weirdo/older/nerdy guy they met at the amusement park gave them
fess up now if you were that guy

This is pretty much the first live song I ever heard from them (I had heard some Come On Pilgrim tracks on the radio before, but not live)

http://rapidshare.com/files/857629830/01_-_intro___vamos.mp3 (from that April 1988 Dutch FM radio show & audio cassette)

haha I put "La La Love You" on several mixtapes

although I was much more likely to go with "Dead"

"Dead" a much better choice

My go-tos were "Dead", "La La Love You", "Silver" and "Gouge Away"

For the longest time I had a cassette copy of "Surfer Rosa" and "Come On Pilgrim" that a friend made for me - this was pre-"Doolittle" - and it wasn't until years later that I bought a copy of the album proper and realized he had cut off "Where Is My Mind?" for space. (This was before you were guaranteed to hear the Pixies all over the place).

I remember sending my brother a C90 tape with Doolittle on one side and Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub on the other.

A C60 cassette tape made by a guy I met on summer holiday was my first acquaintance with the Pixies and it blew my mind. The same guy also taped dEUS' 'Worst Case Scenario' for me, mind was equally blown. I always think of Spain therefore, when hearing either of the two.

I started at Doolittle (as I imagine many people did) and by the time TLM came out, it sounded really pop.

Do you mean that Doolittle sounded really pop, or Trompe le Monde?

Yeah, to me, Doolittle is the pop album. But something upthread reminded me of why I don't ever listen to them anymore, and it's not exactly their fault. They were never exactly a secret band for me, even in the early 90s. They had pop appeal, and every cute girl knew the Pixies. They were never underground, in that sense. Maybe like the Shins today? Different channels of distribution etc, but the Pixies weren't a club, the way, say, the Wedding Present were at the same time. But over the past decade + half, Where is my Mind has become Blister in the Sun, and Here Comes Your Man has become New Slang. Again, not their fault, but it doesn't make me want to hear them. They just remind me of Urban Outfitters by now.

what hip and new bands do you listen to, paulhw

At the time it was released, I was talking about TLM; now, I agree that Doolittle is the poppier although neither are particularly challenging.

X-post. Dayo, this baiting thing is silly. I was just sharing my more general cultural sense of hearing them in 1989, and the cachet they have now. Things is they were *received* as slightly silly "college rock" then, not to be taken too seriously. Journalists were writing about, i dunno, House of Love or something then. Not that I would defend that. For me, they're funny college rock, which is fine. The reason they've stuck is the novelty value: Frank Black had a curious lyric, or a noisy bit, or an interlude, that drew people in. 17 year olds today say "there were rumors he was into field hockey players." fine. just not for me.

are you into field hockey players, paulhw?

I came into the Pixies backwards, because when they originally happened I was in junior high and the first couple years of high school (where I lived without MTV or any good radio stations or any record stores or any cool older friends/relatives). Once I got to college, iirc this happened within the first three weeks of my freshman year, I heard "Monkey Gone to Heaven" and "Debaser" on the school's alt-rock station and was sold. Doolittle was the first record I bought after that, from then on I was pretty much in love with these guys. So, yeah, I encountered it all with fresh ears and didn't have any larger career arc to tie my expectations to.

my initial exposure to them was the alec eiffel video on a taped episode of 120 minutes that I watched over and over again. then I gave someone a cassette of surfer rosa for her birthday, along with several other rough trade cassettes from the sam goody bargain bin and we listened to that tape a few times that evening.but i didnt really get into them until summer 94, when a friend of mine bought doolittle and trompe le monde on CD and they soundtracked the summer, which for us was the summer of learning to smoke pot.

I should note that we weren't total stoner shut-ins at this point. so we weren't treating doolittle like dsotm stoner headfuck material. it's more like when we weren't out in the woods getting stoned, we were inside listening to the pixies.

I do think there is a "you had to be there" element to the Pixies appeal. They were sexy, weird, funny, catchy, dark, pretty, abrasive. They were sincerely ironic - or was that ironically sincere? You couldn't hear them on the radio (except for college radio), or see them on MTV (except if you stayed up for 120 Minutes). They were cool and only a few people seemed to know about them. You accepted their strangeness as a kind of shibboleth, separating those hip enough to "get it" from those who didn't. No one worried too much about what it all meant. It's hard to hear all of that in their music now.

I have never gotten irony from The Pixies

(then again I couldn't tell you how "U Mass" went)

I think they were ironic in that free-floating '90s zeitgeist way. You could never tell how seriously to take them. This is part of how they seemed slightly (like 1-2 years) ahead of their time.

Somewhat perversely, "Pixies At The BBC" was the first album of theirs I had, and I hated it at first. It took me a long time to get my head round just how RAW it sounded. Now I think many of the tracks are preferable to the album versions, particularly the ones from Bossanova. The version of "Is She Weird" on there is just immense.

It's amazingly concise too, only two tracks out of the fifteen even top the three minute mark!

Btw, here's a great post on Nirvana and irony which I think also could go for the Pixies in a lot of ways:

http://agrammar.tumblr.com/post/241860089/nirvana-irony-90s

they were *received* as slightly silly "college rock" then, not to be taken too seriously.

I seem to recall them being taken very seriously by the UK papers.

A lot of you folks not getting or not impressed by or altogether not something the Pixies actually do kind of get it: they were both challenging and abrasive and perverse and catchy and accessible. Which is what made them the perfect bridge act from the college rock/Amerindie scene to the mainstream. It's not a coincidence that their relatively cultish career (at least in the US; they were pretty huge in the UK) coincided precisely with what may have been the nadir of American pop, and that mere months after their breakup Nirvana had become the new pop.

in the US, it's not like your mom knows who they are. at least not my mom.
i don't know, even with the mystique-deflating reunion, the pixies' records still seem to me to among the best american rock records ever.

Their whole career was squashed into about 15 months for me. Someone taped Doolittle for me in about May or June 1990, then I bought Bossanova when it came out a couple of months later, then I went backwards to Surfer Rosa in late 1990, then I taped Come On Pilgrim off another mate in early 1991, then got Trompe Le Monde when it came out (Aug? Sep? 91) and didn't like it as much as the others. Then they suddenly split up.

It's not a coincidence that their relatively cultish career (at least in the US; they were pretty huge in the UK) coincided precisely with what may have been the nadir of American pop,

sez you!

Says me, yeah, Not one, not two, not three, but four number one Paula Abdul singles!

Four!

two of which were terrific!

One with an animated cat!

(was that a terrific one?)

two steps forward

there's a great outtake of black francis/kim deal doing "opposites attract"

I think my challop-meter is on the fritz.

people would have really understood the subversive current of that song if they'd gone with the original name of MC Shit Snatch