Sleeve notes
Pixies
Doolittle · 1989
The Pixies arrived from Boston in 1987 with a template that Kurt Cobain later named explicitly: quiet/loud dynamics, melodic verses detonating into distorted choruses, lyrics that were alternately surrealist and directly violent, and Frank Black's extraordinary guitar-player-disguised-as-frontman at the center. Surfer Rosa (1988), produced by Steve Albini with a characteristic refusal of polish, and Doolittle (1989), their commercial peak, together described a new grammar for guitar rock that the mainstream would eventually catch up to.
The Pixies' influence on Nirvana is documented; their influence on British shoegaze is less discussed but equally real — the idea that pop melody could coexist with noise, that a song could be beautiful and ugly in the same measure, runs from the Pixies through My Bloody Valentine and beyond. Black Francis's lyrics, which suggested elaborate mythologies without providing them, and Kim Deal's bass — half-melodic, half-counterpoint — gave the band a tension that no subsequent reunion has quite reproduced. Deal also led her own band, the Breeders, from 1989.
