Pixies: Classic or Dud

I like Bossanova and still listen to it, but otherwise relate to your experience. It was a big enough drop in quality that I just never even bothered after that.

i still totally adore bossanova

particularly the really short songs

Weird, I don't hear a drop in quality at all. I think if anything it's even more aggressive in its non-conformity. Begins with an instrumental (fake) classic surf song, followed by an impenetrable aggro burst, followed by a mix of pop-nuggets, space-weirdness, more aggro experiments and compact epics like "The Happening."

Trompe Le Monde is magical and really the only one I still listen to. It's one of my favourite albums of all time.

Pixies' original run is unimpeachable imo — throw in the first few Breeders / Amps records and those first two Frank Black albums and that's enough incredible music for me to forgive them for anything.

I think a lot of my problem with "Bossanova" is the mix, which eviscerates the rhythm section. It all sounds a bit wimpy. When "Trompe Le Monde" arrived with its more muscular sound, it was like a rebirth.

I'm also a huge Trompe le Monde fan. I haven't listened to Bossanova since the 1990s, when I felt it didn't hold up to the others. Maybe time to try it out again.

I can imagine a "Bossanova" with a more visceral recording and perhaps a reordered track list being one of my favorites. There's plenty of good material to work with.

'velouria' alone is enough to justify bossanova... timeless lyrics. trompe le monde has better guitar parts than any of the other albums!

They really should have put new stuff out in 2004, but all we got was "Bam Thwok" as a glimpse of what could've been.

also "Ain't That Pretty At All," which rules. I think it's cool that they did one "new" song (sort of a Breeders cover) written by Kim and one cover featuring Kim's voice, and then stopped before they could fuck up.

I don't mind the mix of "Bossanova." Reminds me of similarly thin/trebly mixes on a lot of other contemporaneous records, especially showgaze/UK stuff, like the first Suede album. "Trompe" does have awesome guitar parts.

I really love the sound of Bossanova, "All Over The World" is mesmerizing. Even the lesser songs sound amazing and huge

I liked some songs on The Golem, cant recall how many times I listened but I could go back. Kind of an oddity.

Teenager Of The Year has some of the best early tracks sequencing, just incredibly fun

Anybody want to translate this 2002 Christgau review for me (in the middle of a positive review):

Put off by Black Francis's feyness, I sensed what is now clear, that he's a pomo sociophobe of a familiar and tedious sort. Where in retrospect his philosophical limitations seem harmless annoyances, they portended many regrettable developments in irony, junk culture, sexual eccentricity, and other folkways that deserved better.

Hard to imagine him keeping up that level of greatness over the years. Really wasn't much interested in stuff like Devil's Workshop, Show Me Your Tears, Honeycomb, Fast Man Raider Man but then I'm not sure I'd dig the sort of music he was going for back then

I don't mind the mix of "Bossanova." Reminds me of similarly thin/trebly mixes on a lot of other contemporaneous records, especially showgaze/UK stuff, like the first Suede album

I read somewhere that Norton and Haigler were going for more of a UK sound. It was 1990 and the '80s big gated drum sound was past its sell-by date. The tinny UK sound seemed as good an alternative as any. The Butch Vig thick compressed sound that would define 90s rock was still a year away.

They still seem like a band very much removed from that Sonic Youth/Dinosaur/Husker sphere

Which is ironic, since Husker Du was one of the biggest influences. What was the Black Francis quote? Something like "I only owned five records, and Husker Du were three of them"?

Found it!

http://aleceiffel.free.fr/bf_bm.html

FRANCIS: I grew up in L.A. when bands like Black Flag were around, but I never listened to them. I was buying used records for 50 cents, and didn't socialize, really; I was lost in headphone-land. I did get to see a Hüsker Dü show when Joey and I dropped out of school and said, « Let's start one of these groups. » And I saw an excellent show by the Hüskers at the Paradise in Boston, where you did « Ticket To Ride » for an encore. Fantastic show, so I knew that Hüsker Dü was a tape I needed to get. I had those albums, a couple of Iggy albums, one Captain Beefheart and a tiny studio apartment. That handful of stuff got me through that particular season. I used to play « Green Eyes » (from Hüsker Dü's Flip Your Wig) over and over. A classic chord progression. Same thing with Iggy's « The Passenger » - one of those repeat songs. At the start of the Pixies I only had four or five albums and the Hüskers were two or three of them.

Funny that those formative listens should, well, form the basis of the Pixies sound. ("Wave of Mutilation" is sort of a sideways rewrite of "Green Eyes"). It's kind of like Alan from Low saying he heard Joy Division and the VU for the first time the same night at college. You hear that, and you hear Low, and you think, well, yeah.

And the help wanted ad description of them as Husker Du/Peter Paul and Mary

Was it 4AD that hooked them up with Albini? Because that was a pretty inspiring pairing, especially at that point. Albini had barely worked on anything but Big Black by then, right?

Tweez was recorded before Surfer. And the first Urge Overkill EP.

(What else? No idea beyond Big Black)

(What else? No idea beyond Big Black)

Yeah, so not much. And it's hard to believe any/many people hearing Tweez and the first UO thought, man, we need to get that guy in the studio with this other band ASAP! It might have been more an inkling that Albini's innate love for the ugly (sound, themes) was a match for the Pixies.

The album was recorded by Steve Albini (who was hired by Watts-Russell on the advice of a 4AD colleague),[18]

Yeah, but why him? I mean, good call!

Found this:

IVO WATTS-RUSSELL, cofounder, 4AD Records: The suggestion of Albini to work with the Pixies was from someone who worked for me at 4AD. Just a guy at the warehouse, Colin Wallace, who now doesn't work in the warehouse - he now manager Liz Fraser of Cocteau Twins and works for Rough Trade. So that came from him at 4AD and Gil (Norton) came from me. Colin said, "You should get Steve Albini to do it. The Big Black records sound great." And that was that, really.

From The Making of Surfer Rosa

The MFSL issue of Bossanova strips all the sheen away. Not to my liking at all

i listened to doolittle today. really good album imo

been listening to the pixies albums (Doolittle, trompe le monde, surfer Rosa) at work and loving it recently, sounds as good as I remember from my late teens, which was when I really listened to them. Creative, unique albums

the first time I heard his voice (something from Come On Pilgrim) I was convinced he was Gordon Gano

i'd like to think i'm not in the minority here, but realizing kim deal's track record over frank has probably been a big blight on the overall pixies image. i will pull any breeders record out any day of the week and not be disappointed where i can't say the same for the pixies at this point.

100%, Deal takes Francis out ANY day.
although Title TK is my favourite so I may not be “of the majority” either

Huh. I love Kim Deal, but I don't like anything by her as much as I like the Pixies with her. I like every single Pixies track, b-sides and all, but I've really never gotten that excited about the Breeders, first album perhaps aside. Post-Pixies, sure, I'd probably gravitate toward Deal because her six albums with the Breeders/Amps are as a whole better than Frank's (counts) 18 post-Pixies albums. Though of the ones I've heard or remember, I don't recall anything bad, and the times I saw him solo were pretty strong whereas the five or so times I've seen Deal live were pretty erratic.

i prefer the breeders as well. doesn’t stop doolittle from being the best rock album ever

Incidentally, Pixies is another band I love that I've just never sought out live clips of. But this set is great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzA3eCHI2ns

I think the first two Frank Black solo albums are really great, basically carrying forward Trompe Le Monde

yeah i think they still sound very cool — his early solo releases are kind of like a West Coast speculative fiction novel mixed with memoir, looking back at a weird southern California past and forward to an apocalyptic future. they're interesting!

Cult of Ray wasn’t bad. It suffered from heinous cover art.

For a while, I'd rank their greater output as Pod, Surfer Rosa > the other three Pixie Albums > Last Splash, Teenager of the Year > various solid tracks mixed among the rest, like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQgV9q6fl1I

First 3 Frank Blacks over any Breeders for me, but Breeders win for overall consistency.

First Catholics album has some fun stuff but really tanks later on. Gotta buy Oddballs now, I've waited too long.

hoo boy bendy, if that's a highlight . . . yikes.

Hmm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbXP8PdwnWM

well that could suck a golf ball through a garden hose

That one's ok when judged against other nu-Pixies work, which is how you have to approach these things now.

I thought this one was better, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7ofPSefhyQ

I was thinking the other day of making a thread on artists who had an amazing burst of creativity but pieced it out slowly over several albums. (Lou Reed's VU-era songs, Liz Phair's first songs, etc.) Forgot that the Pixies had the "purple" tape demos, which had songs that ended up on all four of their original albums.

I suspect that’s “all artists”, it’s just that we only know about those ones