Pixies
The NATN Pantheon
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Surfer Rosa (1988)
Doolittle (1989)
Bossanova (1990)
Trompe Le Monde (1991)
Recommended
Come On Pilgrim (1987)
Complete B-sides (2001)
Pixies (2002)
Frank Black, solo career (1993-present)
The Breeders – Safari (1992)
Worth Hearing
Breeders – Last Splash (1993)
Breeders – Pod (1990)
The Amps – Pacer (1995)
Obsessives Only
“Bam Thwok” (2004)
Breeders – Title TK (2002)
If we can forget for a moment that, as of this writing, a new Pixies album is a possibility, it’s hard to think of any of the Pixies’ full-length albums as not being “must-hear” material. Some might argue that either or both of the group’s final two efforts aren't worth such praise, but that's probably because those records don’t fit into their narrow notion of the band, as a perverted punkish group that inspired Nirvana. And if such generalizations have stopped you from hearing every note the Pixies released from 1987-1992, it’s worth trying to rectify that situation right now.
Fans of rock and roll in all its forms know that the genre's impact is hardest when it’s loud and primal, and visceral -- when the music hits you in your gut. The Pixies hit upon this formula almost as soon as they formed, and ended up setting the tone for modern rock over the past 20 years.
Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV (a.k.a. "Black Francis" and, later, "Frank Black") was a young singer/songwriter attending the University of Massachussetts when he was randomly selected to share a dorm room with Joey Santiago. In his roomy, Thompson found a fireball guitarist who could bring the testosterone-heavy metal riffs but also provide a soothing, melodic aural foil for his own nascent manic, leering vocal style and feverish acoustic rhythms. The pair posted a classified ad seeking a rhythm section interested in Husker Du and Peter, Paul & Mary, and thus they got Kim Deal, a complementary bass player and backing vocalist whose pipes would become a cornerstone of the group’s sound. Through her, the band pulled in kooky drummer David Lovering, he of the speedy fills and stadium-ready backbeat.
Cliché as it seems, the classified ad says a lot: The Pixies came from the underground, but they ended up making music that could reach millions. Their knack for combining dissonance with memorable, even anthemic hooks served as inspiration for generations of musicians to follow. But why do we still care about them? It’s not because we hear another generic radio cut featuring a soft, “haunting” verse section and a cranked-to-11 screaming chorus based on more or less the same chord progression and think, “there goes the legacy of the Pixies’ rock dynamics, still ticking.” Clearly, it's the music.
Great songs, almost all of them, straight through from “Caribou” to “The Navajo Know.” The seductive bass line and Joey’s echo-soaked solo on “No. 13 Baby.” The stuttered yelping and run-on verses of “Broken Face.” The swirling, staccato vortex of “Rock Music.” The mezmerizing Alien road-trip epic “Motorway To Roswell.” They’re all worth another listen, and then yet another.
The foursome started playing live around Boston in late 1986 and went into Fort Apache studios in March of the following year with producer Gary Smith to record a 17-song demo. They printed up copies of a purple-covered cassette with simply the word Pixies on it, sold it at shows, and eventually parlayed it into a record deal with U.K. label 4AD. The label thought enough of the purple tape to not mess with the music on it. Eight of the songs were soon arranged as is into the first official Pixies release, Come On Pilgrim. The rest of the demo songs, though highly bootlegged over the years, finally saw official release in 2002 on Sonic Unyon records as Pixies.
Whomever selected the tracklist for the first record did a good job. Between the Come On Pilgrim and the self-titled compilation, the former is the one you need. Francis introduces his bizarre vocal approach, managing to scream, moan, wail, whisper and warble during the same song, and stay in his key. The music is catchy, rumbling pop rock, with jagged and punky spikes, and as Francis builds tension and reaches catharsis with his varied vocal tics, the band creates a blueprint for the more expansive song styles that would come later. Opener “Caribou” already finds Francis and Kim Deal harmonizing against Santiago’s guitar line, crafting a haunting tune whose cryptic lyrics seem to be pining for a new life as a forest animal: “This human form / where I was born / I now repent,” Francis sings. But that didn’t really give us any idea of what to expect next. “Vamos” starts out with a bit of musing in Spanish over a two-step beat that keeps picking up speed, building toward Santiago’s wailing bridge and the group-chant Spanish chorus about playing on the beach. In between verses, Francis passes the time by yelping in staccato at the top of his lungs, like a maimed cur. “That maid Maria she’s really O.K.!” Sure, whatever you say.
Say what you will of the sentiment, the music was entrancing. “The Holiday Song,” with its driving guitar riff, has proven of the more lasting tunes in the catalog; Francis still quotes it as one of his favorite Pixies songs. For those that like to sing along, Francis makes it fun. He screams a chorus, voice breaking and shattering but still (barely) hitting the notes, so feel free to sing along at the top of your lungs. Now wasn’t that fun? Never mind that “Nimrod’s Son” sticks in your mind for the emphatic lyrics “My sister held me close and whispered to my bleeding head: ‘You are the son of a motherfucker’.” And who knows what “Ed Is Dead” is about? But taken as a whole, Come On Pilgrim established the Pixies sound, and while it certainly had its cultural references (Wire, David Bowie, The Velvet Underground), the sound wasn’t a familiar one.
As for the rest of the songs from the Fort Apache sessions, there were definitely some keepers. “Break My Body,” “I’m Amazed” and “Broken Face” (as well as “Vamos”) ended up in re-recorded versions on the band’s next album, whereas “Subbacultcha,” “Down To The Well” and “Here Comes Your Man” didn’t surface until much later on. The simplistic shuffle “Build High” only made it as far as a b-side to the “Alec Eiffel” single, and “Rock A My Soul” remained unreleased until the whole thing resurfaced as Pixies. The final cut was a cover of “In Heaven (The Lady In The Radiator Song)” from the David Lynch movie “Eraserhead,” which never made it to a Pixies album but became a live staple, notable for the way the group uses a simple chord progression as ballast while the rock tension moves increasingly upward toward a shrieking climax befitting one of their own compositions. Quite a set of tunes for the young group to put to tape, and the whole damn thing was only a demo – produced at the first recording session they ever had! What might happen if they actually got a producer and a record deal and actually sat down to make a proper full-length album?
Well, in that case, you’d get what most consider to be the Pixies' defining document, the seductive and powerfully influential Surfer Rosa.
Steve Albini, late of Big Black and Rapeman, was called upon to serve as “producer,” though he would dispute that title and its connotation of control. He did play a big part, however, which was to give the Pixies’ sound some weight. Surfer Rosa plays hard, and big – you can hear it in the thick, pounding drum sound Albini helped Lovering achieve. From the opening kick drum on “Bone Machine,” the band sounds far different than they did on their early demo recordings. Here is a real rock band, about to kick your ass. Seemingly, everyone’s higher up in the mix, getting their own piece of aural space to make their presence felt…Kim’s bubbling bass, Joey’s shredding licks and Francis’ own bizarre ramblings and vocal fenestrations.
“We were into Japanese fast food / and we dropped off your Japanese lover / and you’re going to the beach all day. You’re so pretty when you’re unfaithful to me!”
So goes Black Francis’ opening statement to Surfer Rosa. All systems are firing on “Bone Machine,” on the shortlist of the best in the catalog. Singsongy chorus, cartoonish yelps, and the hard rock backbeat into which Santiago sporadically launches descending riffs. And those harmonies! Kim Deal, billed as Mrs. John Murphy on the first two records, really comes into her own on Surfer Rosa, asserting her poppy basslines and cooing, breathy vocals into the mix all over the place. She even takes front and center on the sexually charged “Gigantic,” showing the Pixies as a band that rocks hard but is well in touch with its feminine side. This also happens to be the definitive song of the ‘Pixies Sound’ that would go on to be praised by heaps of hipsters and imitated by scores of alt-rock groups – the whole song is built off the same bass riff, but it’s spare at the beginning, violently exploding in volume and amount of instruments in the chorus, and then tapering off again, only to fade out on a melodic jam. Simple and extremely satisfying.
The musical interaction between Deal and Francis might just be the x-factor that took the Pixies over the edge from just being a good rock band to being the paragons of alternative rock they turned out to be. Though the yin-yang dichotomy and sexual tension between the musical personalities in the group ended up destroying the group eventually, it also made their music universally appealing while it lasted.
And what is a pop song if not some little memorable piece of catchy rock music with a lyric about some aspect of a sexual relationship. Boys and girls, flirting with each other. That’s what rock is all about. But some do it better than others. Witness “Cactus,” with its menacing fuzz-bass bottom line and pleading vocals about the visceral attachment of bodily fluids. “Sitting here wishing on the cement floor / just wishing that I had just something you wore / Bloody your hands on a cactus tree / wipe it on your dress and send it to me.” Now that’s love.
But the Pixies weren’t all about dark undertones. They were in the game for the fun of it. “Tony’s Theme” is about riding around on a bicycle and singing about “a superhero named Tony”. Pointless, but catchy. And what of “Something Against You” and “Broken Face”? Between them, not much more than three minutes of music. But the young band knows how to fill the time up with speedy punk rock and weirdly distorted vocals, almost used in a hip-hop fashion. And “Where Is My Mind?” is at the other end of the spectrum. The Pixies finally emphasize Francis’ acoustic guitar and he builds a classic pop epic around a phrase most familiar to anyone who’s ever looked for life’s answers in rock music.
Yet shinier moments in ‘80s underground pop were still around the corner. After establishing their credibility, touring heavily and building a fanbase, the band (or by some accounts, Francis, who was starting to assert his leadership of the band more than others would like) decided to fancy up its sound a bit. Doolittle was recorded with producer Gil Norton, who would helm the next two Pixies records, and it clearly marks a change in the band’s musical direction, but retains the crux of what made their earlier songs great – the surrealist lyrics, cathartic screaming, hard rock riffs and harmonic interplay are all still present, the whole thing just lost a little bit of the garage and gained some pop professionalism.
Opener “Debaser” is one of the band’s trademark songs, a smoothed out “Bone Machine” that’s not dirty-sounding at all. It’s got more of a space-rock-80s-jam sheen. But again, here’s our great hero Black Francis (and what the hell do you call him anymore? Charles? Frank? Black? Francis?) singing about weird-ass shit. “Slicing up eyeballs”?!? In the second line of the song? What the fuck. Maybe if we’d all seen the Luis Bunuel/Salvador Dali silent film “Un Chien Andalou” before hearing the song, then we just might catch Frank’s reference and taste that uncomfortable feeling you get when you see the scene dissolve into madness, the razor blade drawn across the woman’s eyeball, we’d understand what deep truth the Pixies were trying to get across. But “slicing up eyeballs.” Isn’t that enough? The song fades into a jangly jam, and dig those harmonies, Kim Deal sounding like an angel proclaiming back “de-ba-ser” to Frank’s more antagonistic rendition.
“Tame” shows us that they don’t intend to lose their edge, as the simple bass hook of the intro verse quickly gives way to Frank’s buck-wild screaming of the title word as a chorus. Now, some unenlightened soul might say, ‘but why do you keep saying screaming is a good thing?’ Well, just listen to this song. How can you deny the rock power contained in that scream of “tame?” I bet you couldn’t sound that good saying any given word over and over again.
Frank writes some of his best pop songs on Doolittle -- “Wave Of Mutilation,” “Monkey Gone To Heaven” and “Here Comes Your Man” are fittingly some of the Pixies’ most well-known songs. But they aren’t even the best on this album, whose most memorable moments include “I Bleed,” the ultimate expression of Kim and Frank counterbalancing each other. The emphatic downbeat and spare guitar riff lead into the pair echoing each other’s words, Frank almost speaking, while Kim handles the upper register in falsetto accompaniment. She remains steady as his voice picks up speed heading into the second chorus and eventually, after the band breaks into full rock mode, shuffling beat and cymbals and arpeggiated waves of guitar, the pair switch octaves, as Deal starts deadpanning and Frank reaches higher and higher into his screech modulator for that perfect note.
On “Dead,” Frank Black and Joey Santiago get as close as they can in one obscure, rhythmically whimsical song. They start by mimicing each other’s melodies, Francis in a distorted megaphone-esque lead vocal and Santiago in piercing one-note guitar. In what you might call the bridge, the former just shouts out “Dead!” at a most strategic point in Santiago’s circular riff, Deal wailing away at her menacing bass line and Lovering riveting the whole thing down to his pounding rhythm.
“No. 13 Baby” fulfills the dream: sure, Frank has his chance to yelp out a few weird lyrics about tattoed tits and chino shirts before we get down to the real business: the Pixies jamming. Lovering lays down a solid base, and Deal leads the melody, leaving Santiago room to stretch out and he does take advantage, unfurling a smart, spinning guitar line that takes the song many places before its conclusion.
Even the b-sides were near-classics: the “Monkey Gone To Heaven” single included the seductive “Manta Ray,” Black’s first real stab at an upcoming lyrical obsession: a first-person account of a UFO sighting. The Deal-sung “Into The White” -- released as a b-side to “Here Comes Your Man” along with a slowed-down version of “Wave Of Mutilation” and the bizarre “Bailey’s Walk" -- became a concert favorite for the duration of the Pixies’ career. “White” is almost the Pixies’ “You Know My Name (Look Up The Number),” a stubborn jam dotted with repeated rhyming phrases that is obviously just fun to play.
I could describe these songs all day. But now I feel like Peter Falk in “The Princess Bride”. “The story doesn’t end here. She (the Pixies) doesn’t die here. I’m just telling you because you look a little afraid.” Something got a hold of rock critics in the ‘90s to start saying that the Pixies fizzled out after Doolittle and that Bossanova started to bring about the end.
Now, I will concede that the band’s interpersonal relationships started to get so heavy at this point that they would eventually crush the group into breaking up, but the Pixies continued to make great music. That, they never lost the ability to do.
After the 1989 Doolittle national tour, the band went on hiatus, during which time Francis drove across the country with his girlfriend, playing a handful of solo acoustic shows, and Deal formed the Breeders as a side project with Tanya Donnelly of Throwing Muses, Slint drummer Britt Walford and bassist Josephine Wiggs of Perfect Disaster. The group recorded its debut, Pod, in Scotland and released it in 1990 on 4AD.
But the band reconvened in the new decade, once boiling tempers down to a simmer, and the Pixies were once again ready to put together the third course: also on 4AD’s 1990 release schedule was Bossanova, which showed yet another side of the band. Kim was more or less pushed to the background by an admittedly dictatorial Black Francis, who wrote all of the album’s songs (save the opening cover of the Surftones’ “Cecelia Ann”) without the co-writing credits that had speckled past efforts. But certainly at this point, no one would debate Francis as being the leader of the band. It’s his voice, melodies and personality at the forefront of most of their songs and he was writing Pixies songs before he met any of the other members. Either way, to Kim’s credit, she accepted her role at least enough to serve the songs.
The music on Bossanova introduces some new themes – a decided surf music influence (beyond the aforementioned opening salvo) and more attention to the clarity of the instruments’ sound. Though Frank would later abandon big studio budgets and detailed multi-track production, Bossanova is the clear beginning of a five-year period where he embraced those kind of sound values and at least in this instance tried to make the music he put to tape come out sounding beautiful instead of vicious. Take a listen to “The Happening,” and its tale of alien arrival to earth. Frank starts out with his trademark incredulous wail through a pair of verses, but the wordless chorus and fade-out section is all about the smooth vocal harmonies and wafting melody. A nod to the Beach Boys? He even lets the cooing run for minutes while he does a bit of spoken word about driving around the Great Salt Lake and hearing about an alien invasion on the Vegas strip. “They’d come so far, lived this long, I must just go and say hello,” he concludes.
In addition to his subject matter, Frank was also playing more with lyrics, taking his past surrealist images and juxtaposing them with more storytelling and even straight-up wordplay. “Ana,” the dreamy, reverby interlude just before the end of the first side, is the prettiest love song the band recorded, but it’s named not after a girl, but after its anagrammatical lyric format (the first letter of each line put together spells SURFER, apropos to Santiago’s cascading lead guitar melody). “Allison” isn’t named after a girl either – the 77-second pop-punk nugget (think Hollies crossed with Ramones) is, lyrically at least, a tribute to blues singer Mose Allison.
“Velouria” and “Dig For Fire” were as single-worthy as anything the group had done yet, but for different reasons. “Velouria” is an all-out romantic rocker (and yes, apparently about a girl, despite lyrics about lemur skin and time travel), not abrasive, as it might have been in the early years, but shining and clear as the multi-tracked guitars reach for the sky and Deal delivers breathy harmonic vocals. “Dig For Fire” has a bit more of the old-school in it, with Francis reciting nonsense tales of odd characters in a speaking voice of sorts, incredulous in the David Byrne sense (“there’s this old man who has spent so much of his life sleeping that he is able to stay awake for the rest of his years”) and complementary guitar riffs cris-crossing over Lovering’s steady beat. Each gem was released with three b-sides, some keepers among them. “Dig For Fire” comes with a more or less faithful cover of Neil Young’s “Winterlong” in duet form and an entrancing instrumental, “Velvety Instrumental Version,” which Black wrote in his teenage years and would much later in his solo career update and release with vocals. The “Velouria” EP (author’s confession: the first compact disc this 13-year-old cassette-lover ever bought with his hard-earned allowance money) is more of a grab-bag. Guess Frank’s dictatorship didn’t extend to b-sides, as both Kim (“I’ve Been Waiting For You,” another Neil Young cover) and Lovering (“Make Believe,” a curiously honest fanboy tribute to Debbie Gibson) take on lead vocal duties.
Tensions were high on the Bossanova tour and Kim announced a breakup onstage at one point, but the band stayed together primarily because they were getting those props finally. Pixies headlined Reading in 1990, took a break from each other again, and then reconvened throughout 1991 to record their next album in three locations, including Paris. Once the guy who sprinkled Spanish throughout his lyrics after spending a semester in Puerto Rico, Black Francis would dip into a bit of another romance language during his time in France. And he would also dip into other sounds that the band hadn’t explored before but always seemed destined to. Though the band was indeed on its way to dissolving, its leader was just getting started and was ready to stretch out creatively.
Trompe Le Monde, the final Pixies album, was released in October 1991, two weeks after Nirvana’s Nevermind hit the shelves, so the Pixies’ legacy was beginning to catch up with them, not usually a great sign for a band’s continued existence. And yes, the Pixies had changed. It’s accepted that Kim was not really a huge factor in the making of Trompe Le Monde, and keyboardist Eric Drew Feldman (late of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band) was brought in to flesh out the band’s sound, which took yet another turn. Not in any way a continuation of Bossanova’s dreamy surf-pop experiments, Trompe (French for “trick the world”) is the hardest-rocking Pixies album of them all. It’s a full-scale, guitar-heavy sonic attack, though the clean production is about as far from the Albini sound as the group gets.
The first single “Planet Of Sound” was probably Frank’s dream – a spaceman’s travelogue about looking throughout our solar system for Earth after picking up our noise transmissions (“that land of ‘Classical Gas’,”). He plays with rhyming meter, sticking words like “renowned” early in verses and not at the traditional spot where they would naturally pair with “sound.” Frank’s voice is filtered through distortion, but it doesn’t mask the sheer screaming power his vocals express by the song’s end, yelping out “This ain’t no rock and roll hotel! / this ain’t no fucking around! / this ain’t the planet of sound!!!”
There’s barely a half-second’s pause before the group launches full-speed into “Alec Eiffel,” a windblown, hard-rocking pop song about the misunderstood (underdog?) architect of Paris’ famous landmark with a catchy, keyboard-propelled round of a chorus and more off-kilter rhyme schemes.
The one song on Trompe Le Monde that has it all is the curiously titled “The Sad Punk,” a tale of evolution and extinction that covers tar pits, crawling out of the ocean, and hints of man’s future demise. Not to mention some of Frank’s most bloodcurdling screams ever put to tape, all centered on the word “extinction”. The tamer bridge recalls some of Bossanova’s more restrained, melodic parts, in clever contrast to the song’s furious initial burst, complete with Santiago scraping his guitar and the group giving nods to the heavy metal “wall of guitars” that (shh..don’t tell anyone) surely informed most of the underground rock of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Speaking of wank-rock, “U-Mass” is doubtless the cheesiest hard rock song the Pixies put to tape – one simple riff to highlight Francis’ nonsense lyrics about college and alt-rock poseurs. If it weren’t for his powerful sing-scream delivery, the dextrous layering of rhythm guitars, and that cowbellish Lovering-only measure toward the end, it might be hard to swallow such lyrics as “Oh kiss me cunt / oh kiss me cock / oh kiss the world / oh kiss the sky / oh kiss my ass / oh let it rock.” Then again, how is that any different from, or any less deserved of praise than “a mulatto / an albino / a mosquito / my libido”??
The second side of Trompe Le Monde gets a bit weirder, with a rejuvenated version of “Subbacultcha” (first heard on The Purple Tape) and a new song, the 90-second “Distance Equals Rate Times Time” crafted out of the old “Subbacultcha” bridge. “Space (I Believe In),” while almost sounding like a standard amongst the album’s heavy-metal guitar-solo crags and valleys, boasts one of the weirdest self-aware lyrics Francis ever wrote. It seems to be about taking up space on the album by writing the song. “We needed something to move and fill up the space,” he announces, going on to sing about guest musician Jef Feldman playing tablas on the song and then makes a chorus out of his first name: “Jefrey, with one ‘F’ / Jef-rey.” For a bridge, Francis intones “Now I’m going to sing the ‘Perry Mason’ theme,” and makes an echoey stab at exactly that.
At the end, the group finally lets up on the guitar amps for a bit and we get an early peek at Frank’s solo career: “Motorway To Roswell” is another alien road-trip tune (this is pre-“X-Files,” in case you’re not following along chronologically) but has a sad ending – “How could this so great / turn so shitty / he ended up in army crates / and photographs in files.” Francis sounds so sincere singing “And he came right down / he started heading for the Motorway” in the swirly, piano-driven coda that you might think he’s singing about a lost love or an ill-fated relative. And certainly that’s part of what makes the man such a great lyricist in this modern age – instead of the traditional rock and roll lyric about boys and girls and puppy-love emotions, Frank Black has always stretched. He sings about aliens, car crashes, traumatic incest, biblical murder, or even about the very act of writing songs. It’s refreshing.
At this point, the band might have been on a roll. They just released their hardest-rocking and cleanest-sounding record just before alt-rock hit the big time. The music world’s latest darling, Kurt Cobain, confessed that his biggest hit was conceived as a Pixies rip-off. The band even finally got into arenas on an opening slot for fans U2’s “Zoo TV” tour. But internal tensions, and that old standby, “creative differences” got the best of one of rock’s best bands. Another hiatus was inevitable, and Frank Black, who had a new solo album to promote, this time officially broke up the band via fax. No offense to the rest of the crew, but no three-out-of-four that didn’t involve Black Francis could be called the Pixies. A sad ending, though Frank got his comeuppance in a way when Deal’s second album with the Breeders, Last Splash, ended up outselling all the Pixies albums combined! Now that’s gen-x irony at its finest.
Yet it was Francis who had the longest career, continuing to release albums at the Pixies-established pace of about one a year until the present day and beyond. His first two records as Frank Black took his latter-day Pixies direction to its logical conclusion, emphasizing the humor and quirkiness of his pop compositions. 1994's Teenager Of The Year was a smorgasbord, 22 tracks running the gamut of Frank's repertoire.
The following year, he hooked up with drummer Scott Boutier and bassist David McCaffrey, who would form the backbone of Frank's new hard-rocking backing band the Catholics, with whom he honed his road chops and recorded loud records live in the studio. With a succession of lead guitarists, the band released six albums from 1998-2003, the best of which are 2001's Dog In The Sand (Eric Drew Feldman returns to lend smoky keyboards to the mix) and 2003's Show Me Your Tears
And of course, the Pixies reformed, more than a decade after the breakup, to cash in on their legacy and tour large-scale venues around the world to adoring fans. While the only new Pixies song to come out of the reunion so far, the Deal-written, download-only “Bam Thwok” is a horrid addition to the catalog, in concert, the group is just fine. Nobody has lost their chops, and Frank is a better guitar player and better screamer thanks to his years on the road. If you get the chance to see ‘em, don’t think it’ll be one of those dinosaur reunion acts, less an original member or two. This is the real deal.
Yet, the legacy isn’t about fortysomethings playing greatest hits to festival grounds full of kids who weren’t even alive when Come On Pilgrim was recorded. It’s about a band that managed to do something new with rock when the old girl was looking spent. Huey Lewis said the heart of rock and roll was still beating, but who wanted to believe him in the ‘80s, when synth pop and glam rock were the order of the day? Black Francis, Kim Deal, Joey Santiago and David Lovering got together and had such an original take on guitar-based pop-rock music that they made punk music seem palatable to the masses and in the process fueled hundreds of youngsters to start bands of their own and more or less rejuvenate the format. Sure, the Velvet Underground did the same thing twenty years earlier with even wider-reaching implications, but that was when rock was young, and the idea of being jaded not nearly as real. The Pixies were the VU of the ‘80s, and for what it’s worth, their music is still entrancing after all these years, whether encased in plastic or encoded in bits and bytes. It’s still worth another listen, and if you don’t mind, I’m about to go do exactly that.
TROY CARPENTER | Troy Carpenter founded NATN from a Chicago apartment during the ambitious winter of 1998 with co-conspirators Ben French and Jonathan Cohen. After a five-year stint in New York, he and wife Lourdes have recently relocated to Indianapolis, where he spends days listening to music and nights in the kitchen at Elements restaurant. Musical heroes: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Super Furry Animals. What else makes life worth living: Sushi, Phucty, runs in the park, and the Atlanta Braves.