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Album Review
by SashaS
4-7-2002
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| From the Pixies' past... |
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Pixies: 'The Pixies'
(Cooking Vinyl)
The Pixies blast from the past with gust-oh!
While you are busy with either consuming the new Oasis album or getting delighted with the old/new sounds of The Vines or being shocked that Kylie has cellulite (my God - gasp men, YES! - celebrate women) one rather intriguing album may creep by. It is The Pixies collection, simply named after the band’, that, dates back over fifteen years.
Well, in March of 1987, The Pixies - Black Francis (later Frank Black), Joey Santiago, Mrs. John Murphy (i.e. Kim Deal) and David Lovering - recorded seventeen songs at Fort Apache Studios in Boston. “From this collection, which has subsequently come to be known amongst diehard Pixies fans as ‘The Purple Tape’, eight songs were chosen to comprise the Pixies’ first album, ‘Come on Pilgrim’. These are the nine remaining songs and feature the original recording of ‘Here Comes Your Man’, as well as a previously unreleased track, ‘Rock A My Soul’,” informs the back cover of ‘The Pixies’. Plus the studio version of ‘In Heaven’ previously only available as a live track on the single ‘Gigantic’.
The Pixies story starts with Black Frances (Charles Michael Kitridge Thomson IV, actually), a native of LA, bonding with Santiago in Boston and placing an advert for musicians into Peter, Paul And Mary and Hüsker Dü; the only replier was Deal who’d bring in drummer Lovering. The band continued making music for about five years, until late 1992.
This artefact is not only for fans and completists, nor it is just of an archaeological value but letting you in on the creative secrets, the initial visions of songs transformed into what we know and have enjoyed subsequently. The raw, searching, naked and exploring ‘The Pixies’’ nine songs are part and parcel of the legacy of a groundbreaking band displaying the off-kilter themes and mix of turbulent sounds which adorned the band's abridged career; nevertheless a career that has left an indelible impression on the ensuing decade.
Re-listen and re-discover: 1. ‘Broken Face’ (re-recorded for ‘Surfa Rosa’), 2. ‘Build High’ (re-cut as a B-side for the single ‘Planet Of Sound’), 3. ‘Rock A My Soul’ (previously unreleased in the US), 4. ‘Down to the Well’ (re-done for ‘Bossa Nova’), 5. ‘Break My Body’ (re-made for ‘Surfa Rosa’), 6. ‘I’m Amazed’ (ditto), 7. ‘Here Comes Your Man’ (subsequently re-recorded for ‘Doolittle’), 8. ‘Subbacultcha’ (later re-fashioned for 'Trompe Le Monde'), 9. ‘In Heaven’ (the only studio version).
Brilliant way to hear all about the time when things werenot homogenized, dull and predictable... No wonder Nirvana adored them!
8.6/10
SashaS
4-7-2002
The Pixies album ‘The Pixies’ is released 08 July on Cooking Vinyl
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