227 - The Pixies - Doolittle

Doolittle is a personal favorite album of mine. It is the album that introduced me to the Pixies - which resides in the middle of my Top 10 favorite music artists. This album probably best balances surfer rock, college post-punk, humor, horror, abrasive, and smooth. Where the Steve Albini-produced Surfer Rosa was sparce and raw, Doolittle's sound is polished of roughness. Not that the polish is a bad thing, in this case making the songs have a keen sharpness that cuts just as much as its critically acclaimed predecessor.

During my initial drafting of this review, I found myself headed down the path of a track-by-track assessment. Feeling that I could easily spend the next month writing a multi-page analysis of the album, I've chosen to limit myself to picking one song from Doolittle to focus on.

IMO, "Tame" is the epitome of the loudsoftloud sound that The Pixies are known for. Black's whispered-snarl verses accompanied by bass and drums switch into wails and jarring guitars segueing into panted grunts and closing the song off with a final cathartic howl over Kim's perky sighs. And all of that is packed in less than two minutes. The song starts off with Kim's bass bouncing along with Black whispering the lyrics. Joey's guitar is mostly absent during the verses and then come crashing in during the choruses. David's drums, likewise, are barely used during the verses, but get thrashed during the choruses. While the song is brief, the dynamic tension between the verses and choruses seem more cathartic to me.

It is the contrasting textures of brash guitars and whispered female vocals, the humor side by side with "slicing up eyeballs," and, of course, the dynamic amplitude in each song that makes Doolittle so interesting and entertaining for me. After this album, the Pixies would swerve more surf-oriented with Bossanova and then swing toward more noise and introduce keyboards with Trompe le Monde. For me, Doolittle is their Goldilocks album.

Songs I Knew I liked: Let's face it, I love this album. In all honesty, all of these songs are on various points in "like" spectrum. Personal favorites include "Tame," "Here Comes Your Man," "Monkey Gone to Heaven," and "Hey."

Songs I Now Like: No changes.

Songs I Can Go the Rest of My Life Never Hearing Again: There aren't any songs on the album I would WANT to disappear. I am willing to state, however, that the song lowest on the "like" spectrum is "No. 13 Baby." To me, this song is the cornerstone of about half of the tracks on Trompe Le Monde, my least favorite Pixies album.

226 - Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska

One of my big distractions when listening to Bruce Springsteen is the fact that (other than the singles off of Born in the USA) I am much more familiar with Meatloaf and the soundtrack to The Rocky Horror Picture Show than I am with The Boss's music from the 70s. Bruce's style of dramatic rock and roll gets put into the same bucket as those other influences in my mind. Nebraska was able to get past that prejudice of mine by the fact that it is essentially a demo tape of Bruce performing the songs with help mostly from his acoustic guitar and harmonica. Unfortunately, while the stripping of the backing band gets me to forget the Meatloaf comparisons, the quiet songs with acoustic guitar and mourning harmonica sounds just like another musical icon I'm not fond of - Bob Dylan. I'm sorry, but poets with an acoustic guitar and harmonica just don't do anything for me.

The songs that made me look up to see the song titles were almost exclusively the uptempo songs on the album. As a guy that doesn't pay much attention to lyrics, albums such as Nebraska are lost on me. I haven't the patience to listen to the lyrics since this style of folk harmonica evokes nails-on-the-blackboard feelings up and down my spine. But I must give respect where respect is due. Bruce's storytelling is well done. The atmosphere that the demo instrumentation provides melds well with this series of stories of bleak lives. The moment that usually really grabbed my attention on each listen is at the end of "State Trooper" when Bruce breaks out some echoed whoops. My first listen, I immediately thought of The Dodos and got excited about Bruce using the whoops as a new instrument. Unfortunately for me, the whoops were done only a couple of times. It fit perfectly into the mold, but I can understand how that sound was enough of a departure from his sound that it didn't serve a larger role in the song.

Songs I Knew I Liked: None

Songs I Now Like: "Open All Night"

Songs I Can Go the Rest of My Life Never Hearing Again: "Nebraska"