PIXIES Poll: The best track on Doolittle

I listened to the Bossanova again the other day to try to give it a fair shake and I came to much the same conclusion (again) as Dan - but also made me wonder if the people that really love it are more or LESS familiar with the surf music that inspired stuff like "Cecilia Ann". When it first came out I think the people around me that were most blown away were the ones that didn't really know the Ventures or Duane Eddy much and thought that Pixies were onto something really original. Listening back through Bossanova the other day it struck me that the surf stuff on the album was so much more listless than any of the things that no doubt inspired it....it really seemed like they were just walking through it rather than producing a passionate homage.

Interesting that you hear that as faux honky tonk. It just sounds like rock.

(Btw "Rock Music" doesn't have the unbelievably annoying fauxhonkytonk guitar riff repeated over every chorus like Planet of Drownd)

:::: mouse pointer moves slowly towards sb link :::::

yeah i don't hear a lot of honky tonk in that riff!
and bossanova has a lot more going on than just surf rock...i don't think it always succeeds, but it does strike me as the band's most ambitious record.

planet of sound's riff strikes me as almost prototypical santiago tbh

There is a bit of greasy, bar-room, blues-rock in that riff, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Have fun in your greasy bar-room, folks!

"I don't know bout you, but I like that one song by the Pixies that sounds like it coulda been in a monster truck rally commercial. Yee-haw!!!"

no one's said a word about "Subbacultcha"

Aside from the amount of fuzz, the riff is no more "honky-tonk" than the one in, say, "La La Love You."

Yeah you're right, Phil: I was in fact way off on that description. I'm sorry.

subbacultcha started out pretty good back on the purple tape. then they pulled out the good bit and made D = R x T which is excellent and unfortunately they kept the husk, which is the subbacultcha on TLM.

I have never been too fond of subbacultcha. I'll have to check out the purple tape version and see if I like it any better.

I am intrigued by the idea of a monster truck rally that advertises itself using "Planet of Sound", that sounds awesome

I like both 'Distance Equals Rate Times Time' and 'Subbacultcha'.

yeah, i like them separate. but that's how i first heard 'em.
i think subbacultcha is kind of brilliant lyrically

now we live on the sea and relax and ride the tack
drug running on this panamanian schooner
she walks the deck in a black dress
and me i dress up in black
and we listen to the sea
and look at the sky in a poetic kind of way
what you call it
when you look at the sky in a poetic kind of way
you know when you grope for luna.

and look at the sky in a poetic kind of way
what you call it
when you look at the sky in a poetic kind of way

this is pretty great

yeah, i just think it's a pretty inspired song.

It's the best song about trying to cop off with a fat goth girl in a goth club ever.

proven by the scientific method of not bringing enough CDs on a European road trip, Doolittle is brilliant but in need of a severe trim

reduced to 7 or 8 tracks it would be that magical combination of punchy, flawless and 20 minutes long, which more albums probably need to be

the gold stuff here more or less corresponds with the poll results. my personal tracklist, being hyper-reductive and completely disrespectful towards/otherwise unknowledgeable about Pixies would be debaser/tame/wave of mutilation/i bleed//monkey gone to heaven/hey/gouge away (latter is best track btw) but i am sympathetic towards 'dead' and '#13 baby' as well and would possibly add them in sequence on a weak day. rest is filllerrrrrr (except 'here comes your man' which belongs on a different, worse album)

so yeah. 20-minute albums. discuss.

Eff that. "I Bleed" may be filler, but it's some weird, spooky, awesome filler that shits all over most filler from most bands.

um, read my post again, concentrating on the 'tracklist' bit

Yeah sorry, the first time i read it I made it all the way to 'discuss'.

It's a bit of a quandary with bands whose songs generally end before the 3.00 mark.

It's not a problem if most Pixies albums were 20 minutes, given the brevity involved that's going to be a lot of greatness.

But on the other hand they'll feel the need to fill an album out because so many songs are so short.

TLM to me is maybe their most consistent without having as many peaks as Doolittle.

I have never listened to this album and thought "I wish there could be less of this."

Yeah a Doolittle without Crackity Jones is no Doolittle.

Silver is the only song I'd happily lose from this album but the rest is golden.

evan otm

one of the greatest rock albums of all-time. i think it's strength is that there is no stand-out song. there are very few albums this consistent around. the singing on silver is pretty awful but the bottleneck guitar playing plus the guitar fuzz at the end is really nice.

"i bleed" filler? are you crazy? how that song starts slowly and explodes in total self-abandonment is pure genius. it's one of the many highlights.

i bleed made the goddamn cut, man

ok, sorry, i read the wrong post. but in any case the idea of reducing doolittle is weird, it is already a very concentrated album. the longest song no. 13 baby - one of the highlights - is not even reaching the 4 minute mark. doolittle without the gorgeous drunken stagger of "there goes my gun" is like the lord of the rings without frodo.

Nah imago is right. but No 13 Baby is super classic and it's a little disconcerting that you'd relegate it to 'alternate' status

doolittle has just 38.6 minutes, and not one minute is wasted. a 20 minute version would be not more than a torso.

I disagree and feel like the second side is kind of aimless-verging-on-pointless

But I'm a staunch Surfer Rosa partisan, so

"Silver" gets such a bad rep in this thread. I've always loved it. A little bit of solemn sorrow before "Gouge Away" rips everything to shreds.

Kind of a blues song, really.

I know this is sacrilege but if I had to delete one song from this it would be the much-loved "Gouge Away." "I Bleed," on the other hand, is one of the high points of the whole Pixies catalog, probably the very very best playoff of BF's voice against KD's voice there ever was.

Why Gouge Away?

Because something about it reads to me as "the generic Pixies song, about which all I can say is that it sounds good and sounds like the Pixies." It's like the mean of all their other songs.

Generic Pixies song to me would be something like Allison.

Dead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGNhW-iSY_g

^ only one i would ever skip but yeah c'mon, under 40 minutes is pretty tight.

Also Frank going all crazy dog noises on Crackity Jones is A+++++

Gouge Away may be the "mean" of all their songs but it is also my favourite of all their songs.

I just got an email with a link to four more new songs - I'm not sure I'm going to even listen to them.

If someone told me the four new songs were the Pixies I would have had my doubts. It sounds a lot like, dunno, Weezer maybe? A couple are Pixies-ish, I guess, one called "Indie Cindy" and one called "What Goes Boom." "Another Toe" is a nice little song. Black Francis barely sounds like Black Francis though.

Generic mean of the Pixies = Into tge White

Gouge Away is cool bcz they flip the switch: instead of shaving off one from the regular four-measure phrasing for added angularity/tension, they add one to make it five measures and then try to cope withwith the resultant diffuseness.

Plus I am always a little taken with how, after an album's worth of elliptical and esoteric lyrics, how he deploys the Samson and Delilah story in sych a straightforward manner. Its not my favorite song by any means, but the whole Hey/Silver/GA sequence is not what I mean when I gripe about this album

Sorry bout typos

Pixies: Doolittle 25 Tracklist:

Disc One – Doolittle
01. Debaser
02. Tame
03. Wave of Mutilation
04. I Bleed
05. Here Comes Your Man
06. Dead
07. Monkey Gone to Heaven
08. Mr. Grieves
09. Crackity Jones
10. La La Love You
11. No. 13 Baby
12. There Goes My Gun
13. Hey
14. Silver
15. Gouge Away

Disc Two – Doolittle: Peel Sessions & B-Sides
01. Dead (Peel Session
02. Tame *
03. There Goes My Gun (Peel Session)
04. Manta Ray (Peel Session)
05. Into The White *
06. Wave of Mutilation (Peel Session)
07. Down To The Well (Peel Session)
08. Manta Ray
09. Weird At My School
10. Dancing The Manta Ray
11. Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf)
12. Into The White
13. Bailey’s Walk

Disc Three – Doolittle: Demos
01. Debaser
02. Tame *
03. Wave of Mutilation (First Demo) *
04. I Bleed *
05. Here Comes Your Man (1986 Demo)
06. Dead *
07. Monkey Gone To Heaven *
08. Mr. Grieves *
09. Crackity Jones *
10. La La Love You *
11. No. 13 Baby – VIVA LA LOMA RICA (First Demo) *
12. There Goes My Gun *
13. Hey (First Demo) *
14. Silver *
15. Gouge Away *
16. My Manta Ray Is All Right *
17. Santo *
18. Weird At My School (First Demo) *
19. Wave Of Mutilation *
20. No. 13 Baby
21. Debaser (First Demo) *
22. Gouge Away (First Demo) *

* = Previously unreleased

think i've heard all of that previously unreleased stuff on bootleg. the doolittle demos weren't terribly interesting iirc.

I hear they've been curating this for 25 years.