Hold my head - we'll trampoline

Continuing my trip back through the 1990 album charts.

19/08/90 : Bossanova - Pixies

Well, this was a lucky escape - I thought I'd already written this up so was going to get a shocker of an album but, at the last minute, I remembered I'd met Surfer Rosa and Doolittle but not this one - phew!  This was one I owned (6/20) but I've not listened to it in about 30 years, so it will be interesting to see what I think of it.

Somewhat contrarily, they start the album with an instrumental, "Cecilia Ann", but it rollicks along nicely.  As is generally the case with Pixies tracks, the vocal style can be somewhat challenging at times but there's a lot of skill involved and nothing hangs around for too long to get dull - I particularly liked "Velouria", "Allison" and "Hang Wire".  It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but for me this is definitely one of the more interesting albums of the year and much more representative of the sort of thing I was listening to at the time.  On quite a few tracks you really think "The White Stripes must have listened to this album quite a few times" - and I still don't understand why Pixies were so much more highly regarded than Throwing Muses.

We're at a somewhat surprising #3 with a new entry in the chart this week on the start of an eight week run - a higher chart placing that Doolittle but a shorter run.  The rest of the top five were Elton John, Jon Bon Jovi (a new entry), New Kids On The Block (the album I prematurely celebrated avoiding) and Phil Collins and there are no more new entries in the top ten.

Wikipedia tells me this is their third album - so far we've pleasingly met them in order.  It doesn't have an awful lot of interest on the album but, for a change, there's an amusing story.  The band were recording the album with Gil Norton (who has worked with a load of top indie names) at Cherokee Studies in Hollywood and were having all sorts of problems because the mixing desk used to pick up pirate radio stations and the guitar amp basically just hummed whenever anything was plugged in to it.  They couldn't work out what to do about it and were quite stressed - fortunately when out for a beer they bumped in to Rick Rubin who drew upon his immense production and industry experience and came up with a fantastically ingenious solution.  Yes, they went somewhere else - well done Rick for saving the day!

Critical reception was pretty position with Q magazine opining that Pixies were "masters of the calculated incongruity" - whatever that means. I actually think Rolling Stone got it about right by saying it was "more of a straight-ahead rock album – by the Pixies' standards, meaning it's still safely off the mainstream".  Commercially, it did way better here than anywhere else - it only got to #70 in the US (interestingly, their highest charting album over there is Indie Cindy, their 2014 comeback).  I also learnt that Black Francis's real name is Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV, which doesn't quite fit with the indie rocker vibe he generally presents.

"Customers also listened to" Sonic Youth, The Breeders, Dinosaur Jr and Pavement - these are generally stray to the "somewhat TOO challenging" side of things for me.  But Pixies somehow don't - the musicianship is of a higher quality and manage to distract me from Black Francis's wailing when it gets too much, so I enjoyed revisiting this.

12/08/90 - Not as bad as last time, but still dreadful
26/08/90 - Earnestly dull