Pixies
Bossanova
1990, 4AD/Elektra
Mainstream opinion puts the first two Pixies albums on a pedestal and then treats the next two as lesser lights. There’s always somebody around who insists that Doolittle is their best. It was definitive, they might say. It’s the perfect snapshot of the band’s personality. The peak of their screaming surrealism and pulverizing pop. Doolittle was the album on which the band sharpened their blade as good as it was ever gonna get.
There are some cuddly songs on Bossanova and Trompe le Monde, sure, but the shine was off the chrome–or maybe it was TOO shiny as the band got more comfortable in bed with producer Gil Norton, who had a real ear for how to make these strange songs sound like sugar.
Now, I disagree. I disagree so much that I declare Bossanova my favorite of the original Pixies albums. I think it’s great. If the previous records are played-out to the max in my world, this one is still breezy and fun to me. It’s a perfect pop album. It makes me bounce off the walls.
Still, I do understand the detractors to a degree. While Bossanova isn’t a total departure–it’s still no-nonsense screamy rock music–there ARE differences from what came before.
For one thing, Francis here gets over his Biblical fixations (for the moment, at least) and his surrealist shocks and replaces them with UFO’S and OUTER SPACE. He went from Man Ray to Art Bell in one year. He went from slicing up eyeballs to watching the skies. Francis channeled his interest in the absurd and the underground into writing about Area 51 speculation. He also used the mythical lost land of Lemuria as inspiration for the band’s most creamy-dreamy love song. What, no songs about Nazca lines or how aliens helped ancient Eyptians build the pyramids?
The Pixies are still dangerous, but Francis’s more nerdy sensibilities start to show here. Hey, you can’t be the guy who writes rock songs about incest forever, especially if all that stuff was just a goof anyway (which it was).
In other words, on Bossanova, edgy Black Francis begins turning, just a little bit, into mega-geek Frank Black. Maybe that’s why I like it so much.
Another difference: more slow, groovy songs than usual. A few long ones, too (“All Over the World”, which comes off like the story of a weary traveler at first until it turns oddly cosmic and talks about transcendence of the flesh–“All I am are my thoughts”– is almost five-and-a-half lovely minutes long). Those songs don’t define the album–there are plenty of compact rockers here, too–but they do give it a much different shape than Doolittle. That album was a row of deadly spikes. This one is more like a fifteen-song ride through the desert, full of stargazing and late night talk radio. It closes with the band’s most simple, buttercream-frosted ballad. In “Havalina”, everything is fine.
I love the way Bossanova begins. “Cecilia Ann”. A surf-rock instrumental. A cover tune, no less. But it sounds just like the Pixies. I’d know Joey Santiago’s guitar sound even if I was deaf in one ear and couldn’t hear out the other.
The opening one-two punch of “Cecilia Ann” and the violent caveman scream-fest follow-up, simply titled “Rock Music”, set the scene. Together they conjure up B-movies and paper plate flying saucers. Good times on the beach in the midst of a Cold War. Nuclear missles ready to launch from their silos. Housewives in cone bras shrieking at Martians and Communists and rubber suit monsters. If the Pixies previously sounded like a band without a home (occasional Spanish lyrics, a band from Boston who came off like they were from Tijuana, a British approach to sleeve art), this album grounds itself right away in American trash culture.
Put on your 3-D glasses, buy the biggest bucket of popcorn and cruise into the drive-in with the Pixies.
It works beautifully. Because the Pixies are all about nonsense.
(Before I move on, I need to note that the songwriting credit for “Cecilia Ann” goes to The Surftones. For decades, I thought it was some 1960s obscurity, but I finally researched it and I learned that “Cecilia Ann” was actually barely a year old at the time. It was originally written and recorded in 1989 by Charles “Frosty” Horton and Steve Hoffman–yes. THAT Steve Hoffman. The mastering engineer guy who runs the internet’s most infamous audiophile forum. I used to post there about fifteen years ago, back when I was trying to assemble a vintage 1970s stereo system. Now, I can’t even remember my login info. Anyway, according to the story that Hoffman tells on his forum, the track came about when he worked on a surf music compilation for the DCC label and felt that it needed a little extra goose in the ribs so he recorded something new for it. And that was “Cecilia Ann”. And somehow Black Francis, or somebody in the Pixies circle, heard it and liked it and felt that the band should cover it.)
Then there’s “Velouria”, one of the singles and probably the album’s most beloved moment, a spacey love song that comes off like a classic right from it’s opening chords and theremin trill.
There are always two singles on a Pixies album and the other one here is a sugary treat called “Dig for Fire”.
Now, Frank Black has never really criticized the legions of Pixies rip-off bands.
Part of this is because he’s a classy guy who rightfully doesn’t see any benefit to that. He might also take it as flatterey.
However, another part of it might be because the Pixies did a little ripping-off, too, and that’s plain as day in “Dig for Fire”, which shamlessly ransacks Talking Heads (and Black admits this). All it’s missing is a video in which Francis twitches and lip-syncs in an over-sized suit. It’s the most dated original Pixies song, but that doesn’t stop a nostalgic creep like me from still enjoying it. It’s the album’s most pure 1990 moment. This song comes from a world in which pastel-colored blazers are still cool and “Wild Wild Life” is still on the radio and I don’t mind that at all.
“Allison” zips by in just over a minute to pay a punchy tribute to Mose Allison. “Is She Weird” is slow and psychotic and sits as maybe this album’s biggest throwback to Doolittle. Its lyrics sketch out a portrait of a sexy girl in surrealist fashion (“Your heart is ripshit/ Your mouth is everywhere/ I’m lying in it”).
Frank Black sometimes turns to word games for song inspiration and “Ana” is the first known instance of that. The title is short for “anagram”. Meanwhile the first letter of each line forms a simple acrostic. It’s a little chilled-out song for all the naked surfer girls out there.
“Down to the Well” is an old one. The band were playing it live back in 1986, but it didn’t make any of their records until Bossanova. It’s a perfect fit for the album’s apocalypse vibes. I’ve always interpreted it as a nuclear war song, but from the point of a view who a guy who sees it as a chance to be alone with his girl in the fallout shelter. That’s all that it means to him. I think he’s a kid going through the classic adolescent dilemma: How and where do you sneak in sex? The end of the world might help. Very rock ‘n’ roll.
Meanwhile, there’s no need to speculate about “The Happening” because it tells its story right on the surface. The Area 51 speculations are true. Aliens are real and they just landed in Las Vegas. Our narrator is a sad sack driving around Utah who immediately guns it straight to Sin City with the desperation of one who’s finally found meaning in their life. It’s a crazy song, with two very different parts, a shouting blues intro and then a coda that sounds delivered by a hypnotized person. It’s the album’s defining song, its most spaced-out moment and my favorite of the batch. The Pixies don’t play it live much, maybe because it’s hard as hell to sing. Francis has to hold his breath for, by my count, fourteen lines of lengthy verse. There’s no room to slow it down because it’s supposed to sound like an obsessed person venting all of his thoughts in one big run-on statement.
“Blown Away” is a cousin to “Into the White”. We’re lost in space again, but this time hurtling toward the sun and about to burn up at any moment. Or maybe it’s a metaphor for being unable to communicate. Or maybe it’s just about some delicious Joey Santiago guitar squall.
We teleport back to Tijuana for “Hang Wire”, but we’re also being rocked via haiku (count the syllables in the verses). I don’t know what it’s about, but I think someone’s getting a noose around their neck.
“Stormy Weather” is aloof. It has exactly one line of lyric. “It is time for stormy weather”, sung over and over until it can mean anything that you want. Maybe it’s a plain old thunderstorm–or maybe it’s nuclear bombs.
Or maybe it’s anything else that kills you. A sudden heart attack. An accident on the freeway. A hang wire. Your own private stormy weather. Everyone else is getting a sunny day, but black clouds are rolling in for you there, pardner.
And maybe the soft-as-marshmallows finale “Havalina” is a vision of total peace that flashes in our mind just before we go. Or maybe we’ve died and gone to heaven. Or maybe we’re literally reincarnated as a happy javelina doing our thing in Sedona, Arizona.
Your unfair death jump-cuts into bliss the moment that your heart stops. It’s a nice thought. I hope it’s true.
And that’s how the Pixies sing us to sleep here. They’ve never closed an album so gently.
I love the sleeve art. It’s my favorite Pixies album presentation. Vaughn Oliver and Simon Larbalestier were monstrous talents.
Previous releases were dominated by muted, dusty color schemes. They look like something weathered and decayed. It was a good idea for those albums.
Here though, everything is loud. The front cover is a feverish shade of red and the dominant color inside is a metallic silver, like a spaceship. The front reminds me of the 1930s Universal Studios logo, but updated for the atomic age.
It’s also the first Pixies album art to show the band. Kim Deal and David Lovering smile like they’re just happy to be there. Joey Santiago poses like a Western gunfighter minus the guns. And Black Francis strikes an unkempt and unnatural pose, like the surrealist that he still sorta was.