315 - The Pixies - Surfer Rosa

Surfer Rosa captures a college rock sound that is dynamic, conflicting, and catchy. Steve Albini's typical spare production and capturing the ambient sound of the room the music is played in as well as the music itself works very well with this collection of songs from The Pixies. The songs sound as if they were recorded in an abandoned cement-floored and cinder-block-walled building in the middle of the wilderness. This canvas gives the songs' shifts from quiet to loud additional heft and feel. When Black sings "Sitting here wishing on a cement floor/ Just wishing that I had just something you wore," it sounds as if he actually is sitting alone on a cement floor delivering those lines.

The instrumentation in the songs vary from cacophonous waves of quickly strummed and distorted surfer guitar riffs to spare picking of notes - often in the same song. "Vamos" features the longest guitar solo in college rock...and it sounds completely different from any guitar solo one would have heard from the hair metal bands at the time.

Black's vocals go from conversational to a banshee wail or agonized yelp and are frequently countered with Kim's whispering vocals. The lyrics also flutter between cute and creepy - "I was talking to preachy-preach about kissy-kiss/ He bought me a soda/ He bought me a soda/ He bought me a soda and he tried to molest me in the parking lot/ Yep, yep yep YEP!" ("Bone Machine").

Surfer Rosa and Doolittle are my two favorite albums by The Pixies. I love them pretty equally. SR is possibly the best portrait of what makes The Pixies a unique indie rock band while D is more polished with a few more catchy songs. The atmosphere that the Albini production adds to the music is what typically tips the scales to my favoring SR.

Songs I knew I liked: Love them all

Songs I didn't know but now like: See above

Songs I can go the rest of my life without hearing again: As part of a whole, I dig the two spoken clips "You F*cking Die" and Kim's blurb at the beginning of "I'm Amazed," but I don't think those two snippets really add much to one's listening experience...other than highlighting the humor in the band.