No.19 Pixies – Surfer Rosa / Come on Pilgrim

So, straight out the gate I have to admit that I’ve bumped Reign in Blood by Slayer out of 19th place and subbed in Pixies. This doesn’t mean I love it less, but there wasn’t that much I felt that I could say about Reign in Blood that hasn’t been said a thousand times before. It’s the greatest Thrash metal album of all time and 28 minutes that changed heavy music. It’s amazing.

But Surfer Rosa also changed the world, it just took much longer for people to notice. That, and it’s much more fun for me to talk about. 

Pixies were huge in Ireland in their first incarnation. On the Trompe Le Monde tour they sold out the same venue that Nirvana would play two years later. There were several people in my class at school who went to the gig and were evangelical about it, but they weren’t a band I got on with. I really liked Trompe Le Monde but the rest of their discography was… well, weird. And that is how it probably would have stayed until one fateful evening when a girl called Joy split my lip in the mosh pit at a Pet Lamb gig. Joy it turned out was a massive Pixies fan and as we started going out she would introduce me to more of their albums. Which was nice.

I’m not sure why Surfer Rosa / Come on Pilgrim appealed to me more than the rest of the band’s albums, but there’s something raw and vital to this record that sounded like nothing else. This isn’t a cheat by the way, the CD I bought in the 90’s had both the album and the ep on it. 22 songs is a lot of Pixies, but it was never too much Pixies. My friend Terry sold the CD to me for £5 because he bought it and hated it, but his loss was very much my gain.  

Anyway, this album is demented. No one sounds like this, even the bands ripping off Pixies, and there are a lot of them, tend to rip off Doolittle. They don’t have weird screaming at odd moments. They don’t babble in Spanish and they will never have anyone in their band as cool as Kim Deal. However, I don’t hold that last one against them, there are vanishingly few people as cool as Kim Deal.

Steve Albini’s bone dry production makes it feel like you’re in the room with the band and makes the music sound so immediate. When Frank starts doing that weird screaming in Bone Machine  it makes you want to move away from him, because who knows what the hell he’s doing, it’s not a metal scream, I was used to that. This sounded unhinged.

But it’s not all yowling and weird guitar sounds, Gigantic, Kim’s only lead vocal on the album is the sweetest song you’ll ever hear about a big dick. Cactus is a weirdly tender song about missing a lover. (It was also covered by David Bowie, and the man knew a thing or two about a good song.) So what I’m saying is these albums are weird, but they’re not all spiky oddball tunes, there’s a good mix of tuneful and chaos. Usually in the same song.

I’m not sure the band get the due for their lyrics either, there’s some incredible lines in here, from “He took his sister from his head, And then painted her on the sheets” to “She’s a real left winger ’cause she been down south, And held peasants in her arms”

Frank as a way with words unlike any other song writer I listen to.

For a long time, it seemed that Pixies would be one of those lost 90’s bands. They just seemed to have missed the zeitgeist and no matter no matter how many famous people proclaimed their love for the band, they just slipped into semi obscurity. I don’t know if it was directly responsible for their comeback but I’ll never forget sitting in the cinema and my jaw dropping as Where is my Mind was used in FIght Club. I wanted to stand on the seat and scream fuck yea! But luckily I was too invested in the film to embarrass myself. And from there on their popularity snowballed back into a reunion. But that’s a whole different story.

So I think Come on Pilgrim is the stronger of the two releases but it’s a very, very close thing because this CD is a glorious 22 song blast of genius. 

https://lynkify.in/song/ive-been-tired/s8f9FhAp