If Man is five, if Man is five, if Man is five.
There are great albums and then there are seminal albums.
Doolittle by Pixies ticks both of these boxes because it still sounds as if it was recorded yesterday, while its genre-creating influences are still being felt in modern rock ‘n’ roll music.
Pixies were the original pioneers of the loud/quiet/loud dynamic. A certain Kurt Cobain was so heavily influenced by Doolittle that he worried people would think that he was a fraud for stealing their sound.
As a group, Pixies were happy to be categorised as odd right from the beginning and rather than try to ‘fit in’, they revelled in this outsider status because they weren’t arty New York hipsters, nor were they part of the burgeoning Seattle scene.
They were Boston space cadets with a tendency to sing about sex, violence and randomly include Spanish lyrics for no reason whatsoever.
Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff and Soundgarden’s Ultramega OK were already pushing the boundaries of what defined indie music in the late 80’s, but Pixies were about to take guitars, obscure lyrics and sunny surf-rock hooks onto a whole different musical planet.
The biggest compliment that we can pay Doolittle is that if Pixies didn’t make this album, then modern alternative music wouldn’t be what it is.
There isn’t a single band that have picked up their guitars and plugged in their amps since, that weren’t influenced by Doolitle in some way.
Here are our 5 favourite tunes.
5) Hey
One of Doolittle’s prominent lyrical themes are the women of Mr. Grieves, Tame, and Hey as Black Francis draws from the Bible for inspiration on this track.
There’s a wonderful sense of tension that runs through every second of this tune because you get the impression that the frontman desperately wants to be noticed and connect with this girl but he just can’t.
This sense of longing is also reflected in Joey Santiago’s bluesy guitar style, while Kim Deal’s sultry bass is so good that you’re almost convinced that this is a straight up love song.
4) Tame
It must have been at the 0:20 mark when Kurt Cobain had his Eureka moment, because Pixies flipped the switch from soft to heavy while Black’s vocals turned from a whisper to a shout.
If the opening track didn’t grab your attention, Tame almost feels like it’s reaching out from your CD player and punching you in the face in an effort to wake you up for what’s in store.
3) Here Comes Your Man
Pixies were never a band that craved the commercial spotlight but if you had to label one of their songs as ‘radio friendly’ then it’s this one.
This song says everything that you need to know about Pixies because they originally didn’t want to record it, they felt it was too much of a “Tom Petty song”.
The tune was included on the album due to the persistence of their incredibly skilled producer Gil Norton but the real star on this track is guitarist Joey Santiago.
He opens with the Hendrix chord and progresses into that famous riff that was created by double-tracking a 12-string Rickenbacker and a Telecaster.
The song is remarkably upbeat in comparison to the other tracks on the album, which is ironic because the singer says that the lyrics were inspired by “winos and hobos travelling on the trains, who die in the California Earthquake”.
Only Pixies could create a dance floor classic from such a warped, weird and obscure subject matter.
2) Debaser
This might be a bold statement but Debaser is arguably the greatest opening song of any album and the clearest example of a bands raison d’être.
Kim Deal’s killer 16-note bass intro has probably got more people dancing in an indie club than any other song but this track also shows what a talented producer Norton was on the album.
He frequently added layers of guitars, vocals and gated reverb into songs, which is the norm for a host of albums now, and the overdubbed guitars on Debaser are wonderful.
As for the songs most famous lyric? “Slicing up eyeballs” alludes to a 1929 surrealist film made by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s called ‘Un Chien Andalou’. There you go.
1) Monkey Gone to Heaven
An ecological prophet that’s singing a warning song about the earth’s future destruction cloaked in biblical text.
Jesus, if you described this song using the above sentence then it’s very likely that people would look at you like your mad but there’s beauty behind this doomy rambling.
This track is Pixies at their most cohesive and adventurous, two violins and cellos feature, while Black’s lyrics perfectly summarise the album’s major themes, death, destruction and religion.
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