One thing I keep coming back to for some strange reason is the blues. I’ve been paying extra close attention here, listening for sounds or chords or noises that I can trace back to something familiar. Klinger: I’m not ruling anything out until I see the lab results, but all signs point to Pixies as being pretty close to a sui generis rock band. How does that happen, Klinger? Is this band merely an anomaly? A random mutation in the DNA sequence of the past five decades of rock ‘n’ roll? You had mentioned to me last week, in an off-hand manor, something along the lines of the Pixies having no precedent, no touchstones we could easily trace their sound to. Now that we are on Surfer Rosa, I find myself wondering how the Pixies got to the sound that launched a thousand grunge bands. When we talked about Doolittle, we had some idea of where the Pixies were coming from, knowing that they were refining the sound that they had worked out in Surfer Rosa and their early EPs.
#Surfer rosa full#
They wrote great rock songs that seemed to spring fully formed from some unknown fount, proceeded to pack them full of noise and weirdness and then they quit mid-verse (or career as it may be). But then, that exemplifies what the Pixies were all about.
Mendelsohn: And wash over you it will-starting with the hard-hitting “Bone Machine” and Kim Deal’s rolling bass, all the way through the dual guitar work from Joey Santiago and Black Francis on “Brick Is Red”, which might very well be one of the best rock songs ever written until Francis and Deal start to caterwaul off key and off beat (and just as soon as my brain adjusts, the song ends). As a 43-year-old, I find it more difficult to overlook the pain that’s woven throughout those lyrics and just enjoy the wild ride for what it is, but back then I could just let it wash over me. Of course, that’s easier to do when you’re younger and maybe more callow. So when I was younger I focused on the more easily accessible tracks like “Tony’s Theme” or of course “Gigantic”. But it’s also such a dizzying whirlwind that it’s been difficult to grasp its entire scope (especially in the pre-Internet days when lyrics weren’t readily available). Lyrically, of course, Surfer Rosa is a very bleak album, with references to incest, molestation, and violence throughout. Surfer Rosa has long been a puzzlement to me, a crazed lone figure of an album, clothed in coarse camel’s hair, eating locusts and wild honey and prophesying to a generation of vipers that the wrath was yet to come.Īs I’ve been listening to this album over the past few weeks, I’ve come to realize just how much there is to hear. I hadn’t really spent that much time developing that intimate of a relationship with Surfer Rosa, but everything you’ve said here makes perfect sense. How would you anthropomorphize this record, Klinger? Cute, crazy girl with a sadistic streak? Fun drinking buddy with a penchant for breaking bones? Homeless person shouting at their own shadow? And then “Gigantic” kicks in and I’m all like, “Let’s go make some bad decisions together.” Whenever those hit I find myself wishing I was hanging out with Doolittle, even though Surfer Rosa is older, hipper, and can buy beer. There are some great things on it and then there are some downright strange things that are hard to reconcile. Surfer Rosa is the older sister who is definitely cute but has too many face piercings and shaved half of her head but still dresses kind of slutty and I really want to go up and hit on her but my friend keeps telling me that she has a violent streak and that he heard, this one time, that Surfer Rosa stabbed a dude because she found his pickup line to be insulting. Doolittle was the hot, younger sister who was crazy and fun with just enough weirdness to make life interesting. I have always viewed Doolittle and Surfer Rosa as sister records. But first, let me get this out in the open.
Do we have anything nice left to say, Klinger? I have a couple things. We hit Doolittle a while back and spent most of the conversation fighting each other over who could say the most nice things about the Pixies. Mendelsohn: The Pixies have four full-length albums but when you really get down to it, the only two that really matter are Doolittle and Surfer Rosa.
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