Day 133: The Pixies – Surfer Rosa
If I’m listening to the Pixies, usually I’m listening to either an assortment of songs or Doolittle, so I though I’d spice it up a bit today. I also just wanted to listen to a bit of the Pixies, sometimes you just get a hankering. I haven’t heard Surfer Rosa in at least a good decade or so and I know almost nothing about the band, so it’s time I got into it.
Album cover courtesy of 4AD
The band was formed in Boston in 1986 by Black Francis, Joey Santiago, Kim Deal and David Lovering. Francis and Santiago originally met when they were neighbours at their university housing at the University of Massachusetts. Francis went on an exchange programme to Puerto Rico and got disillusioned with his studies, writing Santiago a letter saying “Screw this academics, let’s just start the damn band!” They dropped out of university and moved to Boston to work in a warehouse and start the band.
Kim Deal joined after she saw an ad in a local paper saying that they’re after a “bassist into Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Please - no chops." She was the only person who responded. She was a guitarist who didn’t even own a bass, but they were willing to look past that. She suggested her then-husband’s friend David Lovering as their drummer and he was enthusiastic to join, despite not having played the drums in a while.
The band caught the attention of a producer and recorded a demo that got them signed to the UK independent label 4AD. They released their debut full-length album Surfer Rosa in 1988 and started touring the UK with it, leading to them becoming bigger in the UK than they were back home, with DJ Kurt St. Thomas saying “They were struggling just to get gigs in Boston or New York. And then NME or Melody Maker would rave about the band and you’d be like, “Holy shit, look at this! They’re in the NME, but they’re not even in [their own] local paper!”
The record introduced the band to the world but also impacted alternative music that came after, with artists like David Bowie and Billy Corgan counting themselves as fans. Kurt Cobain was such a fan that he said it was the blueprint for his songwriting on Nevermind and that he might as well have been in a Pixies cover band with how much inspiration he took from them. Specifically, the loud noise-inspired sound contrasting with the softer elements of the record is something that has been imitated but hasn’t really been replicated, at least not as well as they did it.
It’s lyrically as raw as it is sonically, with topics on the album fairly extensively exploring topics like bodily mutilation and incest, but somehow there’s not that big of a shock element to it – it all sort of blends into the soundscape in a way where you’re never wondering about what you heard. You can hear the impact that living in Puerto Rico had on Black Francis’ songwriting, with the Spanish-speaking parts in “Vamos” or mentions of swimming in the Caribbean in “Where is My Mind”. And as much as I usually hate hearing jokey spoken parts between songs, hearing snippets of conversations they had in the studio feels more intimate than obnoxious, I don’t hate it.
There’s no part of this record that I don’t like, they’re somewhere fairly high up in my list of best rock bands of all time. I don’t have much to say today, I don’t know if it’s the debacle of yesterday that has me so tired but I am too exhausted to get anything further out than very good, sounds good, I like very much, it’s a 9/10.