Come on Pilgrim / Surfer Rosa / Doolittle / Bossanova / Trompe le Monde / Indie Cindy

Ed. note: This week, the reunited Pixies released their first new album in 23 years. Titled Indie Cindy, the record collects material from three EPs released over the past few months. Two of these EPs have been reviewed by Pitchfork, and both received exceptionally low marks. In the interest of avoiding redundancy with another standalone review of this material, we’ve instead chosen to explore the band’s back catalog. Though none of the group’s original albums have been reissued recently, they have never been reviewed by Pitchfork.

____

The great anecdote about the Pixies is that they formed when a college dropout going by the name Black Francis put out an ad for a female bass player who liked both the punk band Hüsker Dü and the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary.

The Venn diagram here would be tight. Hüsker Dü made noisy, bleeding-heart records for the underground label SST; Peter, Paul and Mary sang “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” Francis got only one response, from a woman named Kim Deal. She had never played the bass before but presumably saw in his ad some sly humor and the spark of liberated thinking that lies behind a bad idea.

Crucially, the Pixies weren’t from New York or Los Angeles, or even Chicago, but Boston: a famous place but fiercely provincial, with all the reticence of small-town New England and almost no cosmopolitan sheen. We can always depend on Boston for more sports and software engineers. Early on, Francis—a comic-book kid raised in an evangelical church—talked about the band’s music with all the pretense of someone fixing toilets or laying shingle. “You want to be different from other people, sure, so you throw in as many arbitrary things as possible,” he told the writer Simon Reynolds shortly after their 1988 debut, Surfer Rosa. A few minutes later, the band’s drummer, David Lovering, interrupted to describe a video he’d seen of “people shooting eggs out of their ass, right across the room into another guy's mouth.”

The band’s songs were about Old Testament Christianity, UFOs and white women who crave sex with big black men—fixations that in certain contexts can turn ordinary people into outcasts. Francis liked the surrealist movies of Luis Buñuel and David Lynch circa Eraserhead, which use violence not as a real-world dynamic but a metaphor for the roiling inner worlds we can cover up but never quite control. On a Surfer Rosa song called “Cactus,” he begs a woman to cut herself up on a cactus and send him the bloody dress in the mail. For the Pixies, this passes as a ballad. In general they remain solid evidence for the theory that the darkest and most violent thinking is done by the quiet kids next door.

In March 1987, the band went into a warehouse studio called Fort Apache and worked for three days straight, producing 18 songs. The project cost a thousand dollars, including printing, tapes, and beer. Eight of these songs were released as Come on Pilgrim on 4AD, an English label that had built a reputation selling, moody, vague bands like Dead Can Dance and the Cocteau Twins but by 1987 had also released some Bulgarian choral music, the number-one dance-pop song “Pump up the Volume,” and an album by their first American signing, the Throwing Muses. More recently, they’ve released albums by Deerhunter and Ariel Pink, and in general remain a safe home for uncommon art.

Pilgrim is 20 minutes long and more of a hint at what the band could do than anything else. Two of its best songs (“Caribou” and “Vamos”) ended up being re-recorded in more muscular forms; another (“Nimrod’s Son”) unfortunately wasn’t. The other songs from the Fort Apache sessions—which came to be called “The Purple Tape”—ended up scattered throughout the Pixies catalog, also in stronger versions. As much as the band changed and refined their sound over time, they seemed almost romantically attached to a big-bang concept of their own music, like a person who measures every relationship against that first love.

Surfer Rosa is highly combustible music, but slapstick, too. Many of its songs feel half-finished or regurgitated in half-digested form, with verses that run on longer than they ordinarily might, choruses that repeat odd numbers of times instead of even ones, and abrupt shifts in tone and volume. Francis was less of a rock singer than a grotesque impression of one, too angry and too tender, a pantomime of extremes. He sounds new but seems to come from an old place, like an obscure bog predator with alien-looking adaptations.

But for all their radical ideas, the Pixies depended on convention—without it, they would have nothing to pick apart. Like Devo or Pere Ubu before them, they were an art-rock band steeped in the 1950s and early ’60s, a period of music before rock was considered art. Their songs feed back to surf, boogie, doo-wop and early R&B more easily than anything post-Beatles. The notion that they were changing the shape of alternative rock seemed like a nice bonus but immaterial. In an anecdote from the sessions for the band’s 1988 album, Doolittle, Francis told producer Gil Norton that if two-minute songs were good enough for Buddy Holly, they were good enough for him.

Doolittle is their most famous album and for understandable reasons. It’s more even keel than Surfer Rosa and better mannered, too, forgoing the harsh live sound of Steve Albini for the lush, almost folksy one of Gil Norton, who had had previously worked with marshmallows like Echo and the Bunnymen. Its songs take aim at the big things important art is sometimes supposed to: good and evil, environmental ruin, Bible stories, death. “Monkey Gone to Heaven” features some allegory about the ozone layer, which in the late 1980s had the same conversational weight and place as “climate change”; “Gouge Away” flirts with Catholicism. “Hey” is practically their “Like a Prayer,” an oblique gospel anchored by the premise that we too may one day break free our earthly bonds and ascend—a trope art has worked with for much longer than rock music has been around.

It’s in Doolittle's margins—the faux-hillbilly cackling of “Mr. Grieves,” “There Goes My Gun” and “Dead”—that the album becomes what it really is. At heart, the Pixies were a kind of American goth band, fascinated by rural violence, the intersection of lust and danger, creepy innkeepers and the sexual magnetism of strangers who wander into roadside cafés from parts unknown. Their biggest crossover single, “Here Comes Your Man,” is less tied to European dada than the rustic imagery of a pulp paperback: The boxcar, the nowhere plains, the big stone and the broken crown.

About four years ago I moved from New York to Arizona and found myself listening to the the band's last two albums—1990's Bossanova and 1991’s Trompe Le Monde—a lot. It’s true what they say about the desert when they say it looks like the moon. Plants and animals seem proud to have survived the odds. Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde make sense to me here, when it’s 110 degrees by lunch and the concrete ripples in the heat. They’re narrower in scope than Doolittle, and have a tough, inorganic presence, like burnished chrome.

But I think what keeps more people from listening to them is that they seem like albums that don’t care whether you listen to them or not. Bossanova is sweeter than Trompe, but its sweetness exists at an impossible distance. “She’s my fave, undressing in the sun,” Francis whispers on the cryptic miniature, “Ana.” “Return to sea—bye. Forgetting everyone.” Later, on “Havalina,” he spots a javelina—an ornery, boar-like animal not uncommon here—walking across a plain. The music is a slow dance between celestial bodies, heavenly but melancholic. So he sees the boar, and in two short lines, the song is over. Late Pixies songs are triumphs of private epiphany: Small, diamond-bright moments that flash in someone’s eyes and then disappear forever.

By Trompe Le Monde the band had transitioned from seeming like quiet people who liked violent movies to violent people who didn’t make much time for movies at all. This is outlaw music, sharpened by conspiracy theory and too much time with too little human contact. “I had me a vision/There wasn't any television/From looking into the sun,” Francis sings on “Distance Equals Rate Times Time,” splitting “sun” into two syllables as though to make sure you heard him and are duly disturbed. He still howls and screams, but had also developed a new voice, a flat, posthuman kind of monotone. Trompe is more aggressive than anything in their catalog but also more confident. They can handle this now, and they do.

Francis’ allusions to Catholicism turned into overt talk about UFOs, which makes sense when you remember that religion has always just been a way to explain the lights in the sky. A kind of concept album emerges, especially toward the album’s end: a song about the geography of Mars followed by a song about a burnout named Jefrey—“with one f”—sitting on a carpet with a tabla, thinking about outer space, followed by Francis staring into the sun, a gesture made out of the desperation to find new answers.

For however classically far out the Pixies got toward the end, they had also never sounded so grounded. The album’s climax, “Motorway to Roswell,” is half-written from the perspective of an extraterrestrial, but turns on Francis’ question: “How could this so great, turn so shitty?/He ended up in Army crates.” Reality had never made such a decisive appearance in a Pixies song.

The band came together in an unusual way but broke up like anyone else: Creative differences, in-fighting, the collision of fragile egos. Francis went on to make several solo records as Frank Black, one of which is called Teenager of the Year and is the sound of a creative person relinquishing himself of the pressures of being in a famous band and appreciating the practice of not giving a damn. Listen to “Speedy Marie”; listen to “Thalassocracy.” Feel the joy and the lightness. Then return to Trompe Le Monde and you can hear how angry Francis had become.

Kim Deal moved on to focus on the Breeders, a project with her identical twin Kelley whose albums sound like abstract slumber-party music for teenagers with comfortable access to weed. Last Splash belongs in the Library of Congress, and their subsequent albums—Title TK and Mountain Battles—remain object lessons in how bands can remain weird without ever becoming alienating.

After 11 years of separation, the Pixies reunited and went on tour, becoming one of a slew of ’80s and ’90s alternative bands lobbying for heritage status. Francis never fully reconciled with Deal, who played several of the reunion shows but opted out of recent recording sessions and has embarked on her own time-capsule show, touring Last Splash with the Breeders. Deal’s symbolic contributions were as important as her musical ones: The cool, down-to-earth woman who defused Francis’ showy angst. She had actually been fired between Doolittle and Bossanova and subsequently rehired, and on later Pixies albums appears just often enough to reminds you that she’s in the band.

The Pixies have now been reunited for four years longer than they were around to begin with, but are just getting around to releasing a new album, which they have called Indie Cindy. Worse than any of the music is the feeling that a band so deft at challenging the system has become part of it in the most predictable ways, rubbing together the tropes of their old art and hoping they can still start a fire, replacing experimentation with routine, filling Kim Deal’s place with not one but two different bassists over the last five months, breaking up the album into three EPs to gin up interest, and generally reminding us that artists of their stature are businesses, not charities.

Things start decent and peter out quick. “What Goes Boom,” “Greens and Blues,” “Indie Cindy”: these are slick songs, a little overextended and puffed up, intimidated by the band’s legacy but charming in their own way. But part of what made the Pixies interesting is that they always seemed to possess some unquantifiable danger, which they no longer do. Three middle-aged guys seeing what happens when they get back on the horse and try again, they now sound most comfortable when they're being laid-back, “Greens and Blues” and the chorus of “Indie Cindy” especially. The album’s lows aren’t so much bad as routine. “Snakes,” “Blue Eyed Hexe,” et cetera: these are just distractions, breadsticks.

Indie Cindy’s title track is built using the template of Bossanova: Spacey and gorgeous, shattered and dissonant, spacey and gorgeous again. Toward the end of the song, Francis offers the line, “As we follow the bouncing the ball/They call this dance the washed-up crawl,” and then, a simple plea: “Indie Cindy, be in love with me.” Part of loving the Pixies has always been the suspicion that they were gracing us from an alien place somewhere beyond love, where sentiment was never easy or necessary. It may be the most vulnerable line Francis ever wrote.