MUSIC: Pixies - Doolittle 25

One thing that seemed to be impressive about the 25^th anniversary of Doolittle was that the Pixies seemed to be more interested in releasing new material instead.

Well that turned out to be wrong didn’t it?  Here it is – just in time for Christmas – Doolittle 25, a re-release of the album with B-Sides, Demos and Peel Sessions.

If you’re the kind of person who’s interested in B-Sides, Demos and Peel Sessions (and believe me, I am), you’d think this would be the mother of all packages.  It’s not even very expensive.  What makes it much less impressive is that the Pixies have already released a complete B-Sides and Peel Sessions separately roughly 15 years ago, meaning that a significant amount of the songs on Doolittle 25 are almost certainly on the shelves of the people most likely to buy Doolittle 25.

Then...

Another point of minor contention is that the album hasn’t been remastered, which is so much expected of deluxe editions it feels like it should be pointed out in big letters when something hasn’t been tinkered with.  On the whole I think most remasters are pretty good – I certainly haven’t come across a remastering which has made something sound worse.  In this respect I think I am relatively easily pleased – just look at the one-star reviews of Nevermind on Amazon to read some audiophiles kicking off about something called the Loudness War and a lot of uses of the word ‘dynamic’ in a way I don’t really understand.  Some things definitely need remastering (the Beatles remasters were necessary), sometimes it can seem like pouring old wine into new bottles.   Really though if you are going to buy an album for the second time it’d be nice to know they’ve done something to improve it.  Even by just a little bit.  It’d be better to be lied to in a way.

It comes down to this: realistically it’s going to be a majority of existing Pixies fans that  buy Doolittle 25, and Pixies fans will very definitely own Doolittle already, probably the B-Sides and BBC discs as well. So that leaves the demos.  And, Demos usually being the weakest sibling in the Bonus Track family, that’s where Doolittle 25 really hung for me – they effectively rereleased a bunch of stuff we all had already and the only real new content was some demos.  And that would have been really bad; only the demos actually turn out to be really, really good.

...and Now!

I normally skip over demos on deluxe rereleases and I suspect the majority of people do.  With the benefit of hindsight they’re often little more than really awful sounding versions of songs you like.  It’s possible in some cases to make a case for it being interesting to see ‘the creative process in action.’  But just because it’s interesting from a historical point of view it doesn’t necessarily make it fun to listen to.  I mean, who listens to the Beatles Anthology series now?  Who listened to it then?  Even hardcore Beatles fans don’t actually listen to the Anthology series.  The reason for this is that seeing the creative process at work is like knowing how the magic trick is done.  You think you want to know, but really you don’t.  Recent examples include Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions… and Fear Of A Black Planet and Led Zep’s back catalogue – all the bonus tracks are either throwaway or virtually identical to the original.  The alternative 'Stairway To Heaven' is a musical spot the difference but no more.

However, there are exceptions that prove the rule, and the demos on Doolittle 25 are an exception.  As I said in a previous post, although I like all the Pixies’ albums for me Surfer Rosa captures a raw energy whereas Doolittle is just a bit too polished and clean and frankly less fucked up.  Well the demos on Doolittle 25 can give you a glimpse into a world where Doolittle was made in a similar way to Surfer Rosa, or even Come On Pilgrim. The demos are even all laid out helpfully in the same order as the original album. When it comes to the Pixies I believe they were not served as well by ‘polished’ production, or at least they were made less exciting by it.  That doesn’t mean I think they only worked as a raw grungy outfit, more that there are parts of Doolittle where it feels like the production is filling in some gaps that would have been left more intriguing let alone.  That works great for something quite bombastic like ‘Monkey Gone To Heaven’, but not always.  ‘Tame’ is a great example of the production of Doolittle doing the song a disservice.  Listening to the demo of it, the heavy breathing from Frank Black is bestial and creepy.  On the album it sounds merely percussive.  And that’s fine – it is after all a matter of taste – but I find with a band as seminally weird as the Pixies I’d rather hear them being bestial and creepy than merely percussive.  I mean, the second half of Doolittle has some tracks that I’ve always thought of as filler pretty much, but the demos of 'No 13 Baby' and 'Hey' feel more like a brush with insanity and therefore more alive than the album versions. 

Admittedly, this is quite a specialist vindication of Doolittle 25.  It’s basically great news for Pixies fans who thought they got a bit tame after Surfer Rosa and wondered what it would have been like if they hadn’t.  The world is not full to the brim of people (especially in 2014) wondering that.  Doolittle 25 shows what a transitional album Doolittle was - it was apparently during the making of this album that Deal and Black learned to really loathe each other for instance (which is such a given now you tend to forget that they probably managed to be in the same room as each other for whole hours at a time).  So even though there’s a something a bit suspect about another reselling of a much-repackaged and resold (and tiny) back catalogue, I’ve chosen to forgive Doolittle 25 that.  I've chosen not to get up on my high horse and instead enjoy it for making an album I’ve always felt was slightly overrated make complete sense to me.

MUSIC: Pixies - Doolittle & Indie Cindy

There’s a new Pixies album, but first – the past…

 

It’s 25 years since the release of the Pixies’ Doolittle.  Doolittle is a slightly disputable masterpiece, but a masterpiece all the same – it’s the Pixies album which will always be on Classic Album lists, that’s for sure. 

I’ve always thought Surfer Rosa was their best album but maybe that’s because it’s how I got into the Pixies.  I’d tried listening to them before because of their indie reputation (massively influential on Nirvana and Radiohead and loads of other people I liked), but never really got them, apart from ‘Where Is My Mind?’ which I only really knew from Fight Club.  But once when I was ill and found a tape of Surfer Rosa in my sister’s cupboard I put it on on a whim.  The tape was on repeat and some time on the fourth go round it clicked and I understood it.  (Digression: I’ve noticed a lot of the music and books I cherish the most I hated at first.  Is this just me?  Is the lazy part of my brain attempting to stunt the culturally aware part or something?) 

Doolittle sounds less unique than Surfer Rosa to me, and therefore less of an achievement; but perhaps that’s because it was one of those albums that was so influential it became the indie norm.  It has a first half with skittish pop-rock songs with bizzaro lyrics and a darker, atmospheric second half bridged together by the a anthemic ‘Monkey Gone To Heaven’.  Frank Black was obsessively listening to ‘The White Album’ during the making of Doolittle and in terms of making an album greater than the sum of its parts, it shows.  ‘Debaser’, ‘Monkey…’ and ‘Wave Of Mutilation’ don’t lose anything outside of the context of the album, but most of the other songs work better as slow-burning mood-builders, culminating in ‘Gouge Away’, possibly my favourite ending to an album (possibly not – it all depends on when you ask me, really).

Anyway, the big Pixies news this month is a new album, their first for 23 years.  After they split in the early 90s they started touring in the 00s, but these were purely ‘Greatest Hits’ shows – as a creative entity they seemed to have ended for good.  And then quite unannounced they started releasing new music last year.

The Pixies’ reunion has a lot in common with The Beatles’mid-90s reunion we mentioned a few weeks ago in two major ways.  One is that both bands had been dormant for so long and had an influential legacy that new material would always be compared unfavourably to.  The other similarity is that the reunion in both cases was missing a member.  The Beatles at least had two unheard John Lennon vocal tracks to base new songs around; the new Pixies songs have had no input from Kim Deal, their charismatic ex-bassist who quit two weeks before the new material started coming out. 

When ‘Bagboy’, the first new Pixies music in ages was surprise-released last year I was pleasantly surprised that it worked as well as it did.  Faint praise there, I know, but the song had and still has for me an aggressive strangeness and didn’t seem embarrassing.  It didn’t feel out of date, either – where it failed, it failed on its own terms and not for being a museum piece (like The Beatles’ ‘Free As A Bird’). 

And, in fact, a lot of the new material is just as good as some of the songs on Trompe le Monde and Bossanova.  The truth is that the memory cheats and the last two Pixies albums have songs as forgettable as some of the worst on Indie Cindy.  Indie Cindy has some great moments, just not as many as there would have been in their peak.  Playing it alongside Trompe le Monde I don’t see a massive gulf in quality – both albums have a similar killer/filler ratio (though Indie Cindy doesn’t have anything nearly as good as ‘Planet Of Sound’…)  It’s arguable that, for better or worse, Indie Cindy just picks up where Trompe le Monde left off.

Pixies songs in the 21^st century seem to be longer than 3 minutes and veer disturbingly into an MOR vibe sometimes, but they are recognisably Pixies songs. Neither does Indie Cindy sound like the work of a band who’ve cynically slung any old rubbish together to exploit their influential reputation.  They do sound like they’re into what they’re doing whether I think it works or not and that’s the main thing.  ‘Bagboy’, ‘Magdalena 318’, ‘What Goes Boom’ and ‘Snakes’ are all songs where it gels together really well.  ‘Magdelena 318’ is especially weird and insidious, Frank Black’s subdued but still powerful vocals with a mournful surf guitar mixed with a more typical crunch.  On the negative side: ‘Blue Eyed Hexe’ is a fairly weak re-hash of ‘U-Mass’; ‘Another Toe In The Ocean’ and ‘Ring The Bell’ are bland and forgettable.  The title track has some appallingly bad lyrics (“I’m in love with your daughter… I’m the one who’s got some trotters/You’ve many mouths to feed”  Oh dear). 

There’s one thing that nags me.  Indie Cindy isn’t really an album so much as it is a compilation of all the new material that’s been filtering through since ‘Bagboy’ was released for download last year – there is nothing on this album that hasn’t been released already.  This is a major irritation, and undoes a lot of the general good feeling I have toward the band when listening to it.  There is a lot more of a sense of artistic viability in some of these tracks than there was in The Beatles reunion tracks, one-woman-down or no; but releasing an album out of 3 EPs (the last of which was only out a month ago) seems like a casually cynical piece of marketing, and makes it feel like the whole thing was done for the money after all.

Anyway, I’ve deliberately not read reviews of the new Pixies songs to try and make for a non-biased blog, so I’m going to go and read what savagings they’ve no doubt been getting in the press…