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1.) Intro, that is "beside" the Pixies.
The best remedy against Hegelianism? The Pixies. The best neuroleptic against chronic depressive disorders? Always the Pixies from Boston, Massachusetts (the one “spoiled” by the young Bee Gees in '67).
2.) The band, or the fantastic four.
Black Francis, vocals and guitar, undisputed leader, registered as Charles Michael Kitridge Thompson IV; what does it mean to have a "chubby" frontman despite trends… revolution, mockery? Sharp as an eagle and plump as a big blackbird. Screamed, ungainly, stinging vocals, exercising true brutality in the choruses, even to the point of a savage, ferocious, and piercing scream. Causes the chaos starting from the simplest and most linear melodies. His motto, most likely, is "Am I raving or awake?" Writes all the songs. He will call himself Frank Black.
Kim Deal, bass and second vocals, stage name Mrs. John Murphy. Extraordinary bassist, interested in Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul and Mary; she has beautiful vocal harmonies, a nymph that provides a counterpoint to Francis’ emphatic, pompous, sometimes serious, more often crazy and atrocious chanting (not alienating, but wild and primitive). She is his opposite. The vocal alter ego. Graceful, dazzling. A lovely schoolgirl singing with a slightly mawkish and voluptuous tone.
David Lovering, a talented drummer, full-time at the service of urgency, pounding, feverish, frantic, a promoter of heart-pounding percussion, between extremely fast cadences and martial moments.
Joey Santiago, a guitarist of Filipino origin, introduced Black to Punk and Bowie. Crucial for the band are his electricity, his moving walls of distorted sound, his alternating dynamics, his adrenaline rushes, his disturbed, rattling, and swift poetics. He alternates daring harshness with an alluring and persuasive sound, devoid of redundancies and always captivating. He seduces, leaves, returns, and leads into unpredictability and sometimes perfectly finished incompleteness. He's always disconcerting, consequently always new.
3.) The Music, that is the new "Pixiessound."
References? Velvet Underground, Stooges, Neil Young, Pere Ubu, Violent Femmes, Gun Club, They Might Be Giants (for the humor) and the tutelary deities, Hüsker Dü, and Peter, Paul and Mary, that have facilitated their birth and vaccination. But the Pixies are much more. Beyond and far away.
Proponents of an abrasive, wild, anarchic rock, characterized by short, complex, captivating songs, full of electricity, rhythm, and naturally convulsive pulses. "Dog days printed on rundown walls" of distorted sound. Every time you listen to them again, their irreducible freshness makes you feel like it’s the first time and the song is newly minted. It’s about letting yourself be reached in the guts and moved not in metaphysical dreams, but in conscious waking, with energy and vital momentum that never dry up or decay. They exquisitely contaminate you with their orderly but elusive chaos, a rock elixir of eternal youth that flows lymphatically and illuminatingly and is undoubtedly cheering. Rock is often dark, gray, gloomy, painful. Not here: joy and warmth are never lacking.
The band offers us irregular, unpredictable, decomposed, hybrid songs. Every expectation is dashed, every dynamic elusive (see their unparalleled "stop and go’s" due to the underlying anomaly that makes them hard to capture and anticipate). Completely unfinished art, with uncertain outlines, strong contrasts, apparently placed at random, expressed halfway but with childlike evidence and genius. This is how it is for hummable, pleasant, affable melodies, for suggestive and irresistible choruses. And then, immediately after, or in the moment you try to make them your own, they, like these, suddenly derail into noise to quickly resurface or run in perfect symmetry or imperfect inequality, with distortions, in a fierce, laconic, concise challenge, and always with an even outcome. Music that constantly, tirelessly disconcerts, always over the top, that is never predictable or conceivable. Of many dimensions, of infinite reflections. There is Pop and its own aversion, the subversion of the pop song, and the suspicious subversion. The song rarely exceeds three minutes, reduced to the bare minimum, is expanded in speed, in the primordial cry, in the clamor. However, there are no contrivances here, adhering to the idea that, those who go against their inclinations, only double their defect.
An ode to madness? Yes, but to a multifaceted madness that redeems madness itself and assigns it an Erasmus-like role in Rock Music. More or less. The healthy madness that, exegesis in hand, should have saved and redeemed Post-Punk, ever since Ian Curtis, a new Morrison, traced his indelible wound, a fatal imprint, making his anguish, once again, a mortal disease. Providentially, the Boston goblins revived the late '80s "scene", yet without taking themselves too seriously, with self-irony. Nothing was ever the same. Thus, they advocated instinctive, visceral salvation. Urgent. A legacy of Black Francis’ Pentecostal upbringing? Dialectical existentialism? The wild force of Rock? Who knows? Where the risk of losing oneself is greatest, the forces that save emerge most prominently. "No depression." No "all the real is rational and all the rational is real." But "Rock Music." Popular? Garage? The kind that fills the days, the hours, the minutes with meaning, happiness, and Andalusian dogs. I think that’s what it’s about.
What’s the new idiom created by the Pixies. A new genre, not just Punk, nor just Rock, but totally, integrally Pixies. Angular, screechy guitars, regular bass lines, driving drums, neurotic vocals, bizarre lyrics, between enthusiasm and schizophrenia, instinctiveness, and irreplaceable power. Readiness, spontaneity, and some doubt. A direct, imaginative, and festive guitar pop. Enclosed in small, dazzling, concise, irregular songs. Punk + Power Pop. Or Freak Rock = sugary Pop melody + Punk frenzy and more additions of Noise and Surf. For noisy, chaotic pieces, seemingly unfinished but cathartic in their way. A truly, freely alternative Rock. They redefined, renewed the language of Garage Rock. Hardcore punk, Cow-punk, a bit of Folk and Acid Rock, and much more. They crammed, like no one before, Metal and Hard Rock lines inside slender harmonic structures of power pop. For a unique, magmatic, incandescent Sound. Equally catchy and dissonant, accessible and complex. Easy punk and Hardcore. Out of time, they have marked and immortalized the other great paradigm of independent music, the one parallel to the Noise of Sonic Youth. The one lit with stray creativity, humor, and eccentricity. Lighthearted and intellectual, of low and high profile at the same time. Confident and spontaneous. The forerunners of Grunge and Brit Pop to come!
All this "roast" makes them the most important among '80s bands, at least for Alternative Rock.
4.) The Lyrics, that is the non-lyrics.
The lyrics, an important part of the project, are illogical, visionary, and surrealist. Never descriptive, they rely on unpredictable, hyper-real combinations, not so much dedicated to hermeticism, but resting on childlike immediacy and the cultured reference, or presumed as such. They play wildly with the said and the unsaid (like "what cannot be theoretically spoken about is better left unsaid"), in an art of sketching rather than sculpting, hinting or referring, rather than arguing or narrating. There’s no poetic aspiration, but a tracing of the unfinished and a celebrating of incompleteness itself. Words explode more in their musicality than in their meaning, indeed the latter will come later or not at all (like Godot). This explains the phantom use of "Spanglish" language. The reference imagery is college, a bit Animal House, a bit film club and poetic salon for sentimental nerds. Here comes Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dalí, but also Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Breton, Apollinaire. And ultimately, irony or madness, to create a satire with some intent, or ethical outcome. Certainly surreal.
5.) The Albums and the b-sides. That is 1987-1991.
Already exceptional, the Ep "Come On Pilgrim." Surfer Rosa, an intense, hard, compact album with narrative cohesion and overflowing fantasy at the power and spread in every single piece. But the Pixies never stop, they have more dimensions. Thus Dolittle, more blatantly melodic, equally fierce, turns out to be another masterpiece. Both rugged, unassailable, universal. Bossanova, more on Surf Rock than Punk, differentiates itself from its predecessors. In this lies its novelty and shining beauty, which also knows how to contemplate calm. Harmonies gradually less eccentric, more linear, with greater attention to arrangements and melodies. On closer inspection, it is the third masterpiece. Tromp Le Monde still sizzles well, with some revived Noise audacity. But finally, here we are at the B-sides of seven out of eight singles, strung together between 1988 and 1991.
6.) Ah, yes! The Complete B Sides (4AD, 2001)
It’s a collection of the “opposite sides” of the 45s released during the first incarnation of the Boston band, printed only in the UK and, for obscure legal reasons, unavailable in the USA. This compilation highlights primarily, and once again, how all four of them were indispensable and essential for the “Pixiessound” already abundantly described. From here still come rushes of adrenaline, enclosed in angular, suggestive, and often unforgettable pieces. If the whole "resonates" with the greatness of the reference Lps, and lacks narrative unity, except for that given by the diachronic key, there is certainly no lack of temper and tension. It then appears as a good benchmark compared to direct production, useful for enthusiasts and sympathizers. It instills the inevitable question of which tracks could have belonged to the respective “long-distance” tracklists.
It starts off well with "River Euphrates", a re-recording from the "Gigantic" single. Beautiful rolling bass, incisive drums poured into a pounding boogie, Santiago's abrasive guitar, poetic, Kim’s angelic choruses against Black Francis’s neurotic singing, who screams wildly at the chorus, more ferociously than in Surfer.
"Vamos" in an engaging Live performance from '88, more punk than rock, extols the Spanglish.
"In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)", still Live, taken from the original soundtrack of "Eraserhead." It was presented there as dark and electronic, with the voice of a sick and sensual muse, Debbie Gibson, and the beautiful chord progression of Peter Ivers (on David Lynch’s text): Here it is progressively transfigured into a kind of explosive voodoobilly.
"Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf)", slowed down compared to the Dolittle version, expanded, and enjoyable even in this guise.
"Into the White", B-side of “Here Comes My Man” finally assigns the “lead vocalism” to Deal. Hearing her sing, so immanently alluring, is an invigorating experience. The drums are stratospheric, the acoustic guitar allies and duets with the assertive scrapes of the electric one, which Joey then grates with shrill screeching in the chorus. A refined, intriguing, and fickle track.
And now, we come to two immense masterpieces. "The Thing" is a remix of the tail, detached, and made autonomous, from and of “The Happening,” contained in “Bossanova”: an outro section with a "messianic tale set in Las Vegas." Stunning in this guise, unique and unmissable. It parallels, at least in my musical imagination, with the intro to Clampdown by the Clash, and they are the best ever, the beginning and the end, something that deviates from the track on which they are grafted, which takes it radically beyond. In a well-tempered escape. Listen to Santiago's incredible guitar squeals standing out on the initial pulsating carpet (which is not on “Bossanova”). It is opened, in succession, by the sharp drums, the rounded (and wide) bass, a Honky Tonk pianistic percussiveness, which runs through and accompanies the entire track. A must-have concentrated in 1’58’’. Black sings it in silhouette, unusually serene.
The other capital, human and divine at the same time, is the B-side of “Velouria,” "Winterlong"; yes, by Neil Young. Already beautiful just as a choice. Of great caliber. It attests to our ability and art to make others’ songs utterly, entirely their own. Francis and Deal sing in a duet with phlegmatic irony. More speed, more electricity, controversial, and irregular lyricism compared to Neil, both live and studio, and it seems to hold together, in a reflective gaze, the pages of your life, on the verge of catharsis. And you can’t help but smile at that childlike singing of her and him, almost calm, of graceful simplicity and controlled coquetry, until the alternation, ad libitum, in the attractive finale. You cannot help but move with the guitar that feverishly explores all the passages, marking each cadence. An expressive apex this ballad, less violent than usual. Can you do without?
7.) A conclusion.
The monkeys with metallic ink and the Andalusian dogs, but also the manta birostris as this “B Side Story” shows, have replaced Alice's rabbit; at the end of the '80s, American Alternative found its new heroes: the most boorish, the most adorable... ever! Obviously, I love and support this band.
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