Pixies

The Pixies were one of the most influential forces in the American alternative rock scene. Their original blend of garage-rock, hardcore and power-pop was clearly a touchstone for Nirvana, as Kurt Cobain himself admitted ("I was trying to write the ultimate pop song for Nirvana, but really I have to be honest, I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies; we used their type of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard"), but also countless other bands of the following decade (and beyond). And their songs, only seemingly straightforward, marked a major step forward in the use of song form in the history of rock.

Formed in 1986 in Puerto Rico when singer Black Francis (aka Charles Thompson) met guitarist Joey Santiago, the Pixies properly came together in Boston, where the original duo was joined by the talented Kim Deal and their drummer friend David Lovering. The quartet's peculiar noise-pop ("two-thirds noise, one-third pop") is only sketched out on their debut EP "Come On Pilgrim", released on 4AD.

But it's 1988 that saw their definitive breakthrough with "Surfer Rosa", produced by a then still up-and-coming studio wizard, Steve Albini. The brilliant producer – who four years later would form Shellac – brought some inspired ideas to the band's material, filtering vocals and recording in unconventional locations, in keeping with the irreverent, incisive spirit that perfectly matched the philosophy of Black and co. Overall, Albini's live-in-the-room approach amplifies the group's naive exuberance, giving it a harder, more muscular edge, while at the same time refining and redefining its contours.

What comes out of the crackling speakers at Boston's Q Division studios is a genuine sonic bomb: a pulsating, eccentric, acidic, neurotic sonic magma, charged with inexhaustible energy. Everything is up front: the vocal melodies, the guitar lines, the countermelodies of the bass, and even the hooks remain clear, despite all the ferocity of the instrumental chaos driven by Joey Santiago's guitars.

The reference points are wildly varied: the neurotic pantomimes of Pere Ubu, the frantic frenzy of the Violent Femmes, the electric charges of Neil Young, but also the psychedelic ragas of the Velvet Underground and the abrasive rock of the Stooges and early David Bowie. An enormous set of influences, blended and distilled into acidic, violent songs in which, nevertheless, a melodic core is always recognizable, complete with instantly catchy choruses.

Garage-rock is the sonic backbone, the main thread running through "Surfer Rosa", but everything is twisted into a relentless succession of distorted riffs and syncopated rhythms, contagious choruses and hysterical screams. A sequence of short songs (some barely a minute and a half long), by turns playful, sharp, epic and paradoxical, that floor you on first listen thanks to an irresistible freshness and a massive, tumultuous rhythm section. In this, one can't help but detect the influence of the masters, the Clash.

Adding an extra dash of extravagance to an already spicy dish are the surreal lyrics, sometimes sung in a kind of "Spanglish" slang. On this occasion, Francis's writing seems ominously fixated on taboo, incest and sexual violence (“Bone Machine”, “Break My Body”, “Gigantic”), with imagery and metaphors also influenced – by his own account – by the Christian symbolism that shaped his upbringing.

It kicks off at full throttle with “Bone Machine”, a ferocious incursion into dissonance and obsessive effects, its drum intro and verse tightly cadenced before dissolving into a slowed-down refrain, marked by a pulsing bass and backing vocals, with the voices muttering desolately “Your bones got a little machine”, masking the anguish of a sordid tale of assault in a parking lot.

But with the Pixies, tension often degenerates into parody, if not outright delirium. Just think of two deranged gags like “River Euphrates” – a psychotic trip through the Middle East (“Stuck here out of gas/ Out here on the Gaza Strip”) set to a boogie beat, with Kim's barely whispered vocals – and the madcap “Oh My Golly” in Spanglish, strummed on a folk-rock acoustic guitar in the style of Violent Femmes, which spills into Black's unsettling final warning: “She said don't touch-anybody touch, this is my stuff/ And I said you fucking die”.

The fervor grows ever more frenzied. “Break My Body” is an irresistible two-minute explosion of searing guitar and a raw voice spat unfiltered into the microphone, telling another tale of violence (real or metaphorical). The frantic, almost ska-like drive of “Something Against You” conceals another mid-song metamorphosis, with the song starting off almost melodic before rapidly detonating into an orgy of garage guitars and distorted screams straight out of Husker Du.

“Broken Face” almost feels like a tribute to punk's roaring years, with Francis's neurotic falsetto channeling Johnny Rotten. The deranged voodoobilly of the cartoonish “Tony's Theme” seals the most improbable superhero portrait in rock history, while in the “pow-wow” mantra of “Cactus” (borrowing the riff from T. Rex's “Groover”), Santiago's rhythm guitar and Lovering's drumming stitch together a frayed, alienating gait that leaves you stunned (David Bowie would go on to cover it unpredictably on his “Heathen”, 2002).

It's an inspired Kim Deal, in the role of songwriter, who instead pens the solemn ballad “Gigantic”, one of the album's pop high points as well as the only track sung entirely by the future guitarist and lead voice of Breeders: over a simple bassline, bolstered by the drums, the guitars graft themselves on, while Mrs. John Murphy's litany etches a delicate melodic line over a whirl of distortion. Epic and sensual from the very first line (“And this I know, his teeth as white as snow”), even with the barest of embellishments.

But the album's most overwhelming anthem is of course the eternal hit “Where Is My Mind”, inspired in Francis by his scuba dives in the Caribbean: an acidic melody, a heart-stopping guitar line, a relentless rhythm and surreal lyrics all combine to make an almost perfect rock song, destined to become the band's signature tune. Worth remembering too is Albini's curious idea of recording Deal's “ooh-ooh”s that define the track inside a bathroom (!), heightening the disorienting effect of those major-chord pop-rock sounds with their odd, dreamlike gait. “Albini didn't like the sound of the studio, so they took all the Marshalls and all the cables and carried them into this bathroom that was entirely made of concrete, and that's where the echo sound comes from. He didn't want to use studio echo, he wanted real echo”, Kim would recall.

Few songs have managed to become as iconic and timeless as “Where Is My Mind”. Proof of this lies in the string of covers (from Placebo's version to M.I.A.'s samples) and the endless list of soundtracks that have included or recycled it, from the final scene of David Fincher's cult movie “Fight Club” to the piano version in the Italian thriller “The Nest” and Damon Lindelof's series “The Leftovers”.

In such a heterogeneous context, even the so-called “interactions” scattered through the album's grooves can hit the mark, like the one in the hypnotic “Vamos” – a long conversation between Black Francis and Kim Deal punctuated by the electric jolts of Joey Santiago's guitar – or the one that precedes the launch of the bluesy “I'm Amazed”, with Francis bursting into laughter during one of the bassist's monologues.

Closing out the tracklist is the more subdued “Brick Is Red”, embellished by tremulous, melodic guitar phrasing, as if to soothe the farewell from this collective hallucination. Though in truth the whole album is a celebration of the “quiet and loud” concept, developed through a constant emotional seesaw between noise and pop, in which some have even glimpsed parallels with the equally pioneering work done by Led Zeppelin on tracks like “Babe I'm Gonna Leave You”, “Ramble On”, “No Quarter” and so on (cf. Michael Hann, The Quietus).

Made on a budget of just $10,000 provided by a skeptical Ivo Watts-Russell's 4AD, and adorned with a disquieting black-and-white cover of a topless flamenco dancer in front of a torn curtain and a crucifix, “Surfer Rosa” is a startling work, full of endless facets and shades. Few other albums have managed to compress this simmering underlying tension into power-pop choruses, dressing hardcore's hallucinated fervor and untamed violence in melodic form.

Thanks to this feat (and to the subsequent “Doolittle”), the Pixies forged a new rock language, destined to become, alongside that of Sonic Youth, a vast wellspring of ideas for every band on the “alternative” scene of the Nineties. Thanks to them, the primal energy of garage rock was reworked in a postmodern key, with a carefully dosed blend of intellectual eccentricity and urban alienation, teenage exuberance and epic lyricism, Latin anarchy and quintessentially Anglo-Saxon humour.

“Surfer Rosa” would break through on American college radio, top the British independent charts, and be hailed by critics as one of the last masterpieces of “post-punk” or as the manifesto of a new “art-punk”.

Paradoxically, it was none other than its own producer, Steve Albini, who weighed it down right after its release with less-than-flattering words, calling it “the overwrought effort of a band that, at its very best, can churn out fun college rock”. Only to change his mind a few years later, as also confirmed by this interview for the album's thirtieth anniversary.

But that won't be the only obstacle in “Surfer Rosa”'s path, an album that would often remain suspended in a precarious middle ground: too extreme for rock purists, too pop and conservative for fans of underground dissonance. And on many occasions, in the years that followed, it would be others who took the credit in the Bostonians' place, freely drawing from their disorienting rock Babel.

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06/11/2006